National statistical agencies frequently assume very high geometric depreciation rates in order to capture the fact that computers are usually retired after 3 or 4 years of use. However, typically the service flow that a computer generates over its useful life is roughly constant, which...

Using new data from Statistics Canada, the paper shows that the productivity performance of the business sector of the Canadian economy has been reasonably satisfactory over the past 51 years. In particular, traditional gross income Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth averaged 1.026...

The paper considers some of the problems associated with the indirectly measured components of financial service outputs in the System of National Accounts (SNA), termed FISIM (Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured). The paper considers how to integrate financial transactions...

The National Statistician in the UK opened a public consultation inviting views on a range of options for the way the Retail Prices Index (RPI) in the UK is calculated. The consultation closed on 30 November 2012 and a number of questions were raised on whether the Carli index should be replaced...

Diewert and Fox (2013) proposed decompositions of a Malmquist-type productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting technical progress, technical efficiency change and returns to scale components. A major problem with their decompositions is that it may be difficult to...

The paper studies the problems associated with the construction of price indexes for commercial properties that could be used in the System of National Accounts. Property price indexes are required for the stocks of commercial properties in the Balance Sheets of the country and related price...

Household production is an important non-market activity and the empirical literature has developed different methods towards valuing household production without, however, providing a rigorous theoretical foundation for the various approaches. We follow the literature spawned by Becker (1965)...

It is very desirable to find flexible functional forms for unit cost (or profit) functions that are globally concave (or convex). It is easy to find flexible functional forms that are locally well behaved but do not satisfy the required regularity conditions globally. This note examines the...

Fluctuations in housing prices have substantial economic impacts. Thus, it is essential to develop housing price indexes that can adequately capture housing market trends. However, construction of such indexes is very difficult due to the fact that residential properties are heterogeneous and do...

The paper provides a generalization of Becker’s theory of the allocation of time. The paper assumes that household time plays three roles: as leisure, household work and household labour supply, with separate utility valuations for each use of time. The paper also considers the case where...