Many resource-rich countries have poor economic performance and suffer from negative genuine saving rates, especially if they have many rival factions and badly functioning legal systems. We attempt to shed light on these stylized facts by analyzing a power struggle about the control of natural...

Understanding the dynamics of import price developments is an important but challenging issue which affects the way we look on consumers' welfare, real exchange rates and exchange rate pass-through. In this paper we propose an exact import price index which extends the approach by Broda and...

A class of measures in the form of indices is increasingly being developed and used by researchers. The Economic Living Standard Index (ELSI) is one example. The short form of the index is described in detail in (J. Jensen, Spittal, amp; Krishnan, 2005). While it is tempting to draw parallels...

This paper defines and discusses the choices that are implicit in alternative approaches to constructing index numbers. The central theoretical result is the exogeneity theorem, which states that an index number system possesses certain generally desirable properties, associated with...

The welfare contributions of the digital economy, characterized by the proliferation of new and free goods, are not well-measured in our current national accounts. We derive explicit terms for the welfare contributions of these goods and introduce a new metric, GDP-B which quantifies their...

This paper computes a quality adjusted price index for the personal computer CPU from 1996 to 2000. The index is based on the pure characteristics demand model. I first compute the quality adjusted price index for the whole market, and show that it is very comparable with the hedonic price index...

Recent wave of mass popular dissent reminds us that it is necessary to understand social dynamics also from the perspective of social exclusion. Landauer (1900) inquired how to create alternative community with “the inclusion of the excluded as excluded” (Agamben, 1999). Antisystem movements...

The effect on the household consumption price index from possible sources of error in capturing digital products depends on the weight of the affected products. To calculate upper bounds for this effect, we apply weights based on the average structure of household consumption in OECD countries...

Understanding the dynamics of import price developments is an important but challenging issue which affects the way we look on consumers' welfare, real exchange rates and exchange rate pass-through. In this paper we propose an exact import price index which extends the approach by Broda and...

This paper reviews the application of social welfare functions (SWFs) in welfare-maximizing climate policy analysis. We identify several methodological inconsistencies, analyze their policy implications, discuss the theoretical questions raised by them, and provide recommendations for future...