This is an extremely important and long-awaited book. The authors provide a cogent guide to all that is wrong with the theory and empirical applications of the discredited notion of an aggregate production function. Their critique has devastating implications for orthodox macroeconomics. Anwar Shaikh, New School for Social Research, US There are none so blind as those who will not see. For decades now John McCombie and Jesus Felipe have been publishing papers which draw out the implications of the conceptual vacuousness that characterises fitting aggregate production function specifications to data to test the validity of the marginal productivity theory of distribution, a critique first developed by Henry Phelps Brown and Herbert Simon. By careful empirical and theoretical work, they have reached the conclusion that the huge literature on aggregate production functions and technical progress is not even wrong because predictions cannot be tested, that they are only variations on manipulations of national accounting identities. Perhaps this time it really will be different, the scales will fall from the professions eyes. I certainly hope so. G.C. Harcourt, Jesus College, Cambridge, UK and University of New South Wales, Australia This is a very important book. Proofs that aggregate production functions do not exist have been around for more than 50 years. This casts doubt not only on macroeconomic theory but also on empirical work and policy. Yet, this has not deterred macro-economists. The authors show in great detail that the apparent fit of such functions to value-based data is a tautology and not a proof that such aggregates exist. One hopes that the profession will finally take note. Franklin M. Fisher, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US Felipe and McCombie have gathered all of the compelling arguments denying the existence of aggregate production functions and showing that econometric estimates based on these fail to measure what they purport to quantify: they are artefacts. Their critique, which ought to be read by any economist doing empirical work, is destructive of nearly all that is important to mainstream economics: NAIRU and potential output measures, measures of wage elasticities, of output elasticities and of total factor productivity growth. Marc Lavoie, University of Ottawa, Canada This authoritative and stimulating book represents a fundamental critique of the aggregate production function, a concept widely used in macroeconomics. The authors explain why, despite the serious aggregation problems that surround it, aggregate production functions often give plausible statistical results. This is due to the use of constant-price value data, rather than the theoretically correct physical data, together with an underlying accounting identity that relates the data definitionally. It is in this sense that the aggregate production function is not even wrong: it is not a behavioural relationship capable of being statistically refuted. The book examines the history of the production function and shows how certain seminal works on neoclassical growth theory, labour demand functions and estimates of the mark-up, among others, suffer from this fundamental problem. The book represents a fundamental critique of the aggregate production function and will be of interest to all macroeconomists.

This authoritative and stimulating book represents a fundamental critique of the aggregate production function, a concept widely used in macroeconomics.

The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric approaches to productivity measurement usefully address shortcomings of the dominant index number techniques while others maintain that current productivity statistics underreport damage to the environment. In this book, the contributors propose innovative approaches to these issues. The result is a state-of-the-art exposition of contemporary productivity analysis. Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.

Our answer: Not so well. We reached that conclusion after reviewing recent research on the role of technology as a source of economic fluctuations. The bulk of the evidence suggests a limited role for aggregate technology shocks, pointing instead to demand factors as the main force behind the strong positive comovement between output and labor input measures.

Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth presents a selection of recent research advances on long term economic growth. While the contributions stem from both economic history, macro- and microeconomics and the economics of innovation, all papers depart from a common viewpoint: the key factor behind long term growth is productivity, and the latter is primarily driven by technological change. Most contributions show implicitly or explicitly that technological change is at least partly dependent on growth itself. Furthermore, technology appears to interact strongly with investment in physical and human capital as well as with changes in historical, political and institutional settings. Together these papers are an up-to-date account of the remarkable convergence in theoretical and empirical work on productivity and growth over the past decades. The first part deals with the characteristics of growth regimes over longer periods, ranging from 20 years to two centuries. The next four chapters study the determinants of productivity growth and, in some cases, productivity slowdown during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The final five chapters focus on the role of technology and innovation as the key determinants of growth. Productivity, Technology and Economic Growth is, therefore, a welcome collection for academic scholars and graduate students in economics, history and related social sciences as well as for policy makers.

Economic research monograph on the economic theory of production functions and aggregation - includes a bibliography pp. 301 to 307.

Griliches was a modern master of empirical economics. Here, he recounts what he and others have learned about the sources of economic growth, and conveys how he tackled research problems. For Griliches, theorizing without measurement produces mere parables, but measurement without theory is blind. Judgment enables one to strike the right balance.