Not only has U.S. productivity been poor by international standards but it is highly heterogeneous at the disaggregated industry level. Manufacturing has continued to do well while nonmanufacturing has done poorly, especially the services. Within services, apparel retailing has done well while...

This paper argues that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings of a universally valid theory of the business cycle, simply because wages are not universally rigid. Several different statistical techniques suggest that wage rates in the U.K. and Japan are between three and 15 times more...

This paper briefly summarizes the analysis and findings of the 1996 Boskin Commission Report, Toward a More Accurate Measure of the Cost of Living. It then reviews the comments and criticisms that appeared soon after the Report was issued and provides responses to the more important criticisms....

Throughout the postwar era until 1995 labor productivity grew faster in Europe than in the United States. Since 1995, productivity growth in the EU-15 has slowed while that in the United States has accelerated. But Europe's productivity growth slowdown was largely offset by faster growth in...

This paper describes the development of the "triangle" model of inflation, which holds that the rate of inflation depends on inertia, demand. and supply. This model differs from most other versions of the Phillips curve by relating inflation directly to the level and rate of change of detrended...

This paper provides three perspectives on long-run growth rates of labor productivity (LP) and of multi-factor productivity (MFP) for the U. S. economy. It extracts statistical growth trends for labor productivity from quarterly data for the total economy going back to 1952, provides new...

The rise in American inequality has been exaggerated both in magnitude and timing. Commentators lament the large gap between the growth rates of real median household income and of private sector productivity. This paper shows that a conceptually consistent measure of this growth gap over 1979...

This paper shows how misleading is the facile contrast of Europe following a path of high productivity growth, high unemployment, and relatively greater income equality, in contrast to the opposite path being pursued by the United States. While structural shocks may initially create a positive...

The partial-adjustment approach to the specification of the short-run demand for money has dominated the literature for more than a decade. There are three basic problems with this approach. First, the same lag structure is imposed on all variables, and each independent variable enters only as a...

A basic tenet of economic science is that productivity growth is the source of growth in real income per capita. But our results raise doubts by creating a direct link between macro productivity growth and the micro evolution of the income distribution. We show that over the entire period...