1 Ali Dogramaci and Nabil R. Adam 1.1. OVERVIEW With the decline of U.S. productivity growth, interest has surged to under stand the behavior of productivity measures through time, the conceptual foundations of productivity analysis, and the linkage between productivity performance and other major forces in the economy. The purpose of this volume is to present a brief overview of some of the concepts used in aggre gate and industry-level productivity analyses and the results of some of the recent research in this field. The book is divided into three parts. Part I covers some of the methodo logical approaches used in aggregate and industry-level productivity studies. Part II deals with the movement of labor productivity measures through time. The papers in this part of the book study productivity changes as uni variate time series and analyze some of the characteristics of the patterns displayed. The papers in Part III address the issues of measurement of capi tal, the relation of capital formation to productivity growth, and the rela tion of imported intermediate inputs to U.S. productivity performance.

The leading researchers from central banks and universities around the world debate issues central to the performance of Divisia monetary aggregates both in theory and in practice. The overall conclusion is that Divisia monetary aggregates outperform their simple sum counterparts in a wide range of applications the world over. The book is the first volume-length study of empirical data and theoretical research on the subject.

First discussions on several topics of this book took place at a symposium held at the University of Karlsruhe (July 14 - 21, 1985). The book is divided into nine parts with the headings "Methodology and Methods" (4 papers), "Prices" (9), "Efficiency" (5), "Preferences" (7), "Quality" (2), "Inequality" (6), "Taxation" (6), "Aggregation" (6), and "Econometrics" (6). The topics range from the "equation of measurement", a functional equation which plays an important role in the subject, through various approaches to price, efficiency, inequality and tax progression measurement to results on consistency, efficiency and separability in aggregation, productivity measurement, cost functions, allocation inefficiencies, key sector indices, and testing of integrability conditions in econometrics. There are applications to the economies of the U.S.A., Japan and Germany. It contains also papers which deal with preferences, environmental quality and with noxiousness of substances.

Presents the proceedings of two workshops on productivity measurement and analysis, which brought together representatives of statistical offices, central banks and other officials involved with the analysis and measurement of productivity at aggregate and industry levels.

The standard rationality hypothesis implies that behaviour can be represented as the maximization of a suitably restricted utility function. This hypothesis lies at the heart of a large body of recent work in economics, of course, but also in political science, ethics, and other major branches of social sciences. Though the utility maximization hypothesis is venerable, it remains an area of active research. Moreover, some fundamental conceptual problems remain unresolved, or at best have resolutions that are too recent to have achieved widespread understanding among social scientists. The main purpose of the Handbook of Utility Theory is to make recent developments in the area more accessible. The editors selected a number of specific topics, and invited contributions from researchers whose work had come to their attention. Therefore, the list of topics and contributions is largely the editors' responsibility. Each contributor's chapter has been refereed, and revised according to the referees' remarks. This is the first volume of a two volume set, with the second volume focusing on extensions of utility theory.