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 interest in problems of aggregation originates from about seven years ago when we became involved in research in the field of applied microeconomics. To our astonishment a vast majority of researchers in this area took it for granted that their, mostly thoroughly derived, micro models could meaningfully be confronted with per capita data. Nany of them did not even realize - at least they gave no utterance to it - that applying macro data in micro models raises considerable problems. Those who did mention the difficulty, almost always belittled its importance. Fortunately, there are noteworthy exceptions. Thinking about aggregation raises at least two questions: "Why or why not aggregate?" and "How to aggregate and, in particular, to what degree?" General answers to these questions can only be given in uninformative wording (as many assertions in economics): one aggregates for the sake of tractability, because of the lack of (individual) data, to avoid or to reduce multicollineartiy, to save degrees of freedom; one abstains from aggregation to avoid loss of information, to avoid aggregation biases and one aggregates such and to such degree as to bypass or reduce the drawbacks mentioned above.

Specially selected from The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2nd edition, each article within this compendium covers the fundamental themes within the discipline and is written by a leading practitioner in the field. A handy reference tool.

This volume brings together leading scholars to make connections between efficiency and a number of diverse areas of current interest to economists. Included are new results concerning aggregation of technical efficiency, sources of productivity growth in U.S. manufacturing, intellectual property rights, and the determinants of successful mergers.

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

The two components of the advertising industry - the creative sector that develops and produces messages, and the communications sector that transmits messages via various media - have each been greatly affected by advances in creative design and communications technologies. As the media composition of advertising has changed in the last century for both local and national advertising - from newspapers, outdoor and radio advertising to network and cable television, and most recently to internet and digital media - so too has been transformed the very concept of advertising, its functionality and its measurement.We compare four sources of annual nominal U.S. aggregate advertising expenditure data - from the public sector Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Census Bureau Survey of Service Industries, and the private sector McCann Erickson and Magna Global advertising agencies- that are available over various time periods. In nominal terms, we estimate the elasticity of advertising expenditures with respect to Gross Domestic Product, and find that this elasticity appears to have increased substantially beginning in the late 1990s - from about 1.4 to 1.9. The timing of this structural break coincides roughly with the decline of print, radio and network and cable television, and the dramatic increase in digital and internet-based advertising. To understand the forces underlying this structural break in nominal advertising expenditures, data on media-specific advertising prices are needed, thereby converting nominal to real advertising. However, currently annual U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index data on digital and many other advertising media prices are only available beginning in 2010. The availability of media-specific quality-constant price indexes would not only enable researchers to trace more completely the recent impact of digital and internet advertising, but would also facilitate contemporary and longstanding issues to be addressed surrounding the measurement of advertising effects, including how variations in the durability of response to advertising across media are related to inter-media price differentials, and why heterogeneity among firms and industries may arise with respect to the procyclicality of advertising policies.