We describe new evidence that technological change is biased toward producing durables goods. Existing evidence in favor of the importance of change to growth and business cycles is based on the price deflators for investment and consumption goods. Our evidence is based on additional data,...

Recent empirical work using structural VARs with long-run restrictions assesses whether hours worked per capita rises or falls following a technology improvement. This literature reaches divergent conclusions on the sign of this effect, depending on whether hours worked enters the VAR in...

A clear understanding of the rapid development of the newly industrialized economies (NIEs) of Asia remains elusive, with disputes over the roles of technology growth, capital accumulation, and international trade and investment. Most notably, alternative approaches to growth accounting yield...

We document sizeable changes over time and across countries in the comovement of output and unemployment over the business cycle. To a large extent, these changes reflect the evolving cyclical behavior of labor productivity (output per hour worked). For the typical country, productivity shifted...

Recent evidence suggests that output, consumption, investment and hours rise in response to improvements in the technology for producing consumption goods, but all decline on impact when there is a similar improvement in investment-goods technology. We show that these effects are consistent with...