the long run effects of unemployment monitoring and work search programs experimental evidence from the united kingdom this article examines the long run effects of the restart unemployment program in the united kingdom the program aimed at the long term unemployed involved a combination of tighter monitoring of benefit eligibility rules and increased job search assistance we compare the employment behavior of a treatment group who participated in the scheme with that of a randomly chosen control group for whom participation was delayed while there is little evidence of a long term benefit for women the unemployment rate among males in the treatment group was six percentage points lower than that of the control group 5 years after the initial experiment

price taking equilibrium in economies with multiple memberships in clubs and unbounded club sizes abstract we model an economy with clubs or jurisdictions where individuals may belong to multiple clubs and where clubs sizes are arbitrary clubs may be restricted to consist of only one or two persons or as large as the entire economy or anything in between notions of price taking equilibrium and the core both with communication costs are introduced these notions take into account that there is a small communication cost of deviating from a given outcome we demonstrate that given communication costs for all sufficiently large economies the core is nonempty and the set of price taking equilibrium outcomes is equivalent to the core

experimental evidence on unemployment insurance work search policies this paper describes findings from an experimental evaluation of alternative work search policies in the unemployment insurance ui program we find that the no work search treatment significantly increased ui receipt relative to the standard work search approach by 3 3 weeks and 265 per claimant and that the treatment with the most intensive requirements reduced ui payments by one half of a week or 70 per claimant the results suggest that work search requirements reduce ui spells by increasing the nonmonetary costs of remaining on ui rather than enhancing job search abilities we also find little treatment effects for wages earnings or total income suggesting that an increase in the nonmonetary costs of continued ui receipt are associated with more intensive job search rather than a reduction in the reservation wage

growth accounting with investment specific technological progress a discussion of two approaches two approaches taken to the embodiment question are compared and discussed quantitative theory and traditional growth accounting the two approaches give very different estimates for the contribution of investment specific technological advance to economic growth therefore the approach taken matters it is argued that the measures used in traditional growth accounting to gauge the importance of investment specific technological progress have little economic content unlike the measure obtained from quantitative theory

integrated gdp productivity accounts two of the most important statistical tools for analysis of macroeconomics and growth are the national accounts encompassing gross domestic product or gdp and the multifactor productivity mfp statistics which measure output per unit of combined inputs although they share a common accounting framework in the united states these statistics are compiled by separate agencies the national accounts by the bureau of economic analysis bea and the productivity statistics by the bureau of labor statistics bls dale w jorgenson and j steven landefeld 2006 identified the expansion and improved integration of the nation s national accounts and productivity statistics as a high priority of their new architecture for the us national accounts barbara m fraumeni et al 2006 developed the first steps toward integrating the national accounts with the productivity statistics by describing the conceptual framework developing illustrative accounts and describing differences in source data and methods that require resolution our paper builds on that work we develop a prototype integrated production account for the private business sector we also discuss the issues that arise in extending the integrated production account to the total us economy including nonmarket government and nonprofit sectors and provide illustrative accounts for these sectors integration of the national accounts with the mfp statistics will provide data users with a integrated gdp productivity accounts

a retrospective look at the u s productivity growth resurgence it is widely recognized that information technology was critical to the dramatic acceleration of u s labor productivity growth in the mid 1990s this paper traces the evolution of productivity estimates to document how and when this perception emerged early studies concluded that information technology was relatively unimportant only after the massive information technology investment boom of the late 1990s did this investment and underlying productivity increases in the information technology producing sectors come to be identified as important sources of growth although information technology has diminished in significance since the dot com crash of 2000 and observed growth rates have slowed recently we project that private sector productivity growth will average around 2 4 percent per year for the next decade only moderately below the average of the post 1995 period

economies with many commodities we discuss the two fundamental theorems of welfare economics in the context of the arrow debreu mckenzie model with an infinite dimensional commodity space as an application we prove the existence of competitive equilibrium in the standard single agent growth model

the size distribution of innovating firms in the uk 1945 1983 a survey of 4 378 significant innovations shows that firms with fewer than 1 000 employees commercialized a much larger share than is indicated by their share of r and d expenditures innovations per employee have been consistently above average in firms with more than 10 000 employees and have become so in firms with fewer than 1 000 intersectoral variation in the size distribution of innovating firms can be explained as a function of r and d based technological opportunities and of technological ease of entry by user firms with principal activities outside the sector copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

valuation equilibrium with clubs abstract this paper considers model worlds in which there is a continuum of individuals who form finite sized associations to undertake joint activities we show how through a suitable choice of commodity space restrictions on the composition of feasible groups can be incorporated into the specification of the consumption and production sets of the economy we also show that if there are a finite number of types then the classical results from the competitive analysis of convex finite agent economies can be reinterpreted to apply journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d51 h41

measuring and understanding productivity in uk market services many productivity studies if they cover the service sector commonly enter a caveat that the data are uncertain orjust look at manufacturing this paper attempts to clarify what uk market service sector data are available whether they should be treated as inaccurate and what conceptual problems might make measuring service sectoroutput so hard our overall conclusion is that most problems surround financial intermediation and business services infinancial intermediation national accounts conventions and adjustments make the output data very hard to interpret inbusiness services many of the output measures are employment based elsewhere for example retail and wholesaletrade transport and hotels and restaurants the main problem is in practice lack of collected deflators

activating unemployed workers works experimental evidence from denmark abstract in a field experiment in two danish counties about half of the unemployed workers were randomly assigned to a mandatory activation program analyzing data from this experiment we show that activation can be very effective in reducing unemployment durations

the outputs of retail activities concepts measurement and evidence from u s census data the authors develop a new economic framework for the empirical analysis of retail margins this framework formalizes the role of distribution services as outputs of retail activities their main results are the following the measures of outputs of retail activities identified in the data perform as important and robust determinants of retail margins variables that purport to capture oligopolistic features of market structure play a limited or no role in determining retail margins quantity setting and price setting under the assumptions of profit maximization and monopolistic competition are categorically rejected by the data the data base is information on 49 retail sectors from the 1982 u s census of retail trades copyright 1993 by mit press

distinguished lecture on economics in government what we don t know could hurt us some reflections on the measurement of economic activity the routine production of u s economic statistics dates back to the early part of the twentieth century but in recent decades as services output has continued to expand a system of economic statistics that had been designed during the manufacturing era began to seem increasingly outdated over the past decade the statistical agencies have done yeoman work to expand the availability and quality of service sector statistics but the task is far from completed moreover the traditional accounting framework for economic statistics has focused almost exclusively on market transactions looking ahead more comprehensive measurement of productive activities however they may be organized must be a priority

the existence of equilibrium without free disposal in economies with transaction costs and incomplete markets this paper presents a general model of an economy with transaction costs and proves the existence of a competitive equilibrium using t c bergstrom s procedure to discard the free disposal assumption since economies with incomplete markets are shown to be special cases of economies with transaction costs this result is used to discuss the conditions for the existence of an equilibrium in economies with incomplete markets copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

the europe u s productivity gap in a rear view mirror will measurement differences in the services sector output please rise the deterioration in 1995 of europe s productivity performance relative to the u s coincided with the renaissance of the u s statistical system which can be regarded by now as the frontier in official statistics this paper raises the natural question whether the european statistical system was left at the station while its u s counterpart departed making it possible for measurement differences to become the primary suspect for the existing productivity gap my retrospective review of the development path in the services sector productivity statistics suggests that europe lags significantly behind the u s in the services producer price index program both in terms of scope and timing of its implementation accordingly the role of these measurement differences in the post 1995 europe u s productivity story cannot reasonably be ruled out the paper concludes with a structured guess that provides a circumstantial evidence on the benefits generated by the upgrades in the u s services sector statistics the results show that these enhancements led to two kinds of benefits during the post 1995 period a considerable reduction in the contribution of industries that traditionally dampened the aggregate productivity trend combined with a larger contribution of those that generally lifted it this contrasts markedly with europe where the contribution of these two sources remained unchanged in the meantime

agricultural productivity revisited this paper describes production accounts for agriculture output is defined as gross production leaving the farm as opposed to real value added inputs are not limited to capital and labor but include intermediate inputs as well we derive index numbers of gross output capital labor and intermediate inputs these data are used to construct indexes of total factor productivity we then compare the contributions of input growth and productivity growth to economic growth the important role of productivity growth in agriculture becomes immediately apparent

estimating distributed lags in short panels with an application to the specification of depreciation patterns and capital stock constructs this paper considers the problem of estimating distributed lags in short panels though the n time series contained in a panel may allow for relatively precise estimates of identified lag coefficients identification requires restrictions on the contribution of the unobserved pre sample x s to the current values of y and the shortness of panels focuses attention on this matter we investigate two such restrictions the first constrains the relationship between the presample and insample x s while the second constrains the lag distribution itself an example which investigates empirically how to construct capital stocks for the analysis of rates of return closes the paper

competitive equilibria in production economies with an infinite dimensional commodity space the existence of competitive equilibrium is established for economies with a produc tion sector and an infinite dimensional space of commodities the cru cial assumptions which are required beyond those required in the fin ite dimensional setting are bounds on marginal rates of substitution and marginal rates of transformation copyright 1987 by the econometric society

experimental evidence on the effects of early meetings and activation we analyze the effects of four randomized social experiments involving early and intensive active labour market policy conducted in denmark in 2008 the experiments entailed different combinations of early and intensive treatment in terms of meetings and active labour market programmes we find that frequent meetings between newly unemployed workers and case workers can increase employment rates over the next two years by up to 10 weeks the effects continue to grow over the whole 4 year horizon studied for men we find evidence of a threat effect of having to participate in early active labour market programmes while no such effect is found for women we conduct a cost benefit analysis of each ofthe four experiments and find that meetings yield the largest net benefits

intensive coaching of new immigrants an evaluation based on random program assignment the purpose of this study is to evaluate whether intensive counseling and coaching by public employment service pes caseworkers improves the employment opportunities of new immigrants in sweden this is tested within the framework of introduction programs for new immigrants a trial introduction program was implemented from october 2006 to june 2008 within participating municipalities new immigrants were randomly assigned into treatment intensive coaching or control regular introduction programs the results indicate that there are significant treatment effects on employment probabilities as well as on participation in intermediate pes training programs

is the threat of reemployment services more effective than the services themselves evidence from random assignment in the ui system we examine the effect of the worker profiling and reemployment services system this program profiles unemployment insurance ui claimants to determine their probability of benefit exhaustion and then provides mandatory employment and training services to claimants with high predicted probabilities using a unique experimental design we estimate that the program reduces mean weeks of ui benefit receipt by about 2 2 weeks reduces mean ui benefits received by about 143 ana increases subsequent earnings by over 1 050 most of the effect results from a sharp increase in early ui exits in the treatment group relative to the control group jel j650

how to help unemployed find jobs quickly experimental evidence from a mandatory activation program abstract this paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers the activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from november 2005 to march 2006 were randomly assigned to the program while the other half was not it appears that the activation program is very effective the median unemployment duration of the control group is 14 weeks while it is 11 5 weeks for the treatment group the analysis shows that the job finding rate in the treatment group is 30 higher than in the control group this result is mainly driven by the more intensive contacts between the unemployed and the public employment service

measuring the nominal value of financial services in the national income accounts measuring the nominal value of financial services in the national income accounts i introduction the treatment of financial services in national income accounting has been a sometimes controversial subject for over thirty years for economies which specializes in financial services such as switzerland and luxembourg the treatment of these services has always been critical to an accurate assessment of their domestic product and foreign trade status with the recent growth in the financial services sector in the united states this controversy and its resolution are again topical in the united states between 1977 and 1985 the commercial banking share of gnp increased by 34 7 percent while its share in national employment increased by 23 3 percent furthermore the internationalization of capital markets has significantly increased the importance of financial services in the u s trade accounts in this paper we examine both current and proposed treatments of financial services in the national income accounts specifically we briefly review the concepts and methods currently used by the united nations u n and the united states u s commerce department to determine the nominal value of financial services with particular emphasis on their treatment of uncharged for services many financial services are provided without an explicit charge these uncharged for financial services can be viewed as implicit payments to depositors for their funds or simply as payments in kind the issue in the national accounting literature is whether the net interest earned by financial firms should be treated as the value of these uncharged for services and whether it should be included in the nominal value of output in the national accounts 1 we then evaluate a variety of possible methods for inferring the nominal value of financial services from existing sources of information these methods are called imputation methods we base our evaluation of alternative imputation methods on their consistency with a microeconomic theory of financial firms grounded in a user cost of money concept developed by donovan 1978 and barnett 1980 and applied to financial firms by hancock 1985 we show that several of these imputation methods are inconsistent with or not closely related to this microeconomic foundation we then derive a general imputation formula within the financial firm framework and demonstrate how the two leading imputation methods those of the u s department of commerce and the u n statistical office are specializations of this formula our framework thus provides a heretofore absent economic rationalization for the imputation methods commonly used we then briefly introduce a conceptual framework for the construction of a financial firm output price index this index yields a measure of real output consistent with the accounting approaches we summarize our points in the concluding section ii current views of interest payments in national accounts the revenues of financial firms consist largely of net interest the difference between interest received primarily from loans and interest paid primarily on deposit accounts and explicit service charges service charges are typically only a minor part of the total revenue received by banks and fall short of covering the non interest cost of operations by implication financial firms provide services for which there is not an explicit charge and the cost of these services must be partly or wholly offset by net interest controversy however exists over how to value the implicit financial services provided because of long held differences about the way in which interest is viewed as a transfer payment between borrowers and lenders or as a payment for services rendered interest as a transfer payment in this view financial firms merely serve as conduits for the interest payment flows between borrowers and lenders depositors

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

investment specific technological change and growth accounting greenwood et al 1997 long run implications of investment specific technological change american economic review 87 3 342 362 and 2000 the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle european economic review 44 91 115 and hercowitz 1998 the embodiment controversy a review essay journal of monetary economics 41 217 224 have claimed that the jorgenson form of growth accounting is conceptually flawed and severely understates the importance of technological progress embodied in new capital goods for explaining growth to the contrary this paper shows that in its technology aspects their model is a special case of the jorgensonian growth accounting model what they call investment specific technological change is shown to be closely related to the more familiar concept of total factor productivity tfp growth statements about the one can be translated into statements about the other empirically differences between their conclusions and those of growth accounting studies about the extent to which embodiment explains us economic growth are found to relate more to data than to methodology

measurement and interpretation of productivity national research council panel to review productivity statistics national academy of sciences washington 1979 viii 449 pages 18 00 available from office of publications national academy of sciences 2101 constitution avenue n w washington dc 20418 u s a

earnings unemployment and the allocation of time over time since an individual s labour market history can be described by a markov chain in state space it is possible to calculate the steady states it is natural to interpret the steady state proportion in unemployment for a group of identical workers as the natural rate of unemployment for this group i e it is the expected proportion that would be employed if the environment were to remain constant it is shown how the natural rate of unemployment is different for different groups the model is estimated using data from a large u s income maintenance experiment the predictions of the model with some exceptions bear up well to confrontation by data the empirical findings also accord well with existing evidence on cross section studies of labour supply we find that labour force participation rates implied by the estimated models are positively related to earnings for all age sex and race groups as expected we demonstrate that the elasticities of the unemployment rates for all groups with respect to expected wage rates are negative and large in absolute value in the case of adults while the role of the wage in allocation of time is not novel the existing neoclassical labour literature uses static labour supply models to interpret participation rate studies

investment and technical progress models in which the growth rate is exogenous provide no role for government in determining growth in our model growth is associated with investment through externalities from learning by watching rather than with the level of the capital stock presumption of a technical progress function with first increasing and then decreasing returns leads to multiple steady state growth equilibria there is also an explicit role of government policy in setting tax rates on output it follows that two economies with identical structures and stochastic tax policies may exhibit very different growth paths over sustained periods although the stationary distribution of growth rates is the same given the desirability in principle of subsidizing investment various practical methods are considered copyright 1992 by oxford university press

equilibria in noncooperative models of competition abstract an equilibrium in a game theoretic setting a la debreu proc nat acad sci u s a 38 1954 886 893 and shafer sonnenschein j math econ 2 1975 345 348 with a broader structure is proved in particular our framework is general enough to encompass both the aumann econometrica 34 1966 1 17 economy of perfect competition and the nonordered preferences setting of mas colell j math econ 1 1974 237 246 moreover since the dimensionality of the strategy space may be infinite it contains bewley type j econ theory 4 1972 514 540 results and may be useful in obtaining existence results for economies with a measure space of agents and infinitely many commodities

productivity growth in u s agriculture a postwar perspective there has been a long standing fascination with productivity trends in u s agriculture in part this stems from the historical importance of agriculture to the economy but it also reflects economists early and continued interest in quantifying the rate of return to society s sizable investment in agricultural r d the sum of government sponsored and private sector r d investment in agriculture is estimated to have been 268 million in 1953 in that year total r d investment in the economy from all sources amounted to 5 1 billion 2 excluding defense and space related r d which accounted for approximately half of the u s total in the early fifties 3 r d expenditures dedicated to agriculture equaled approximately 10 of total u s investment in r d from all sources

flexible parametric estimation of duration and competing risk models in this paper we specify and estimate a flexible parametric proportional hazards model the model specification is flexibly parametric in the sense that the baseline hazard is non parametric while the effect of the covariates takes a particular functional form we also add parametric heterogeneity to the underlying hazard model specification we specify a flexible parametric proportional competing risks model which permits unrestricted correlation among the risks unemployment duration data are then analysed using the flexible parametric duration and competing risks specifications we find an important effect arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance and significantly different hazards for the two types of risks new jobs and recalls

unemployment duration and the restart effect some experimental evidence in this paper we analyse the effect of ihe restart programme in the united kingdom this programme consisis of an interview of tbe long term unemployed to counsel them on effective job search failure to attend the interview carries the threat of the cessation of unemployment benefits the results using experimental data indicate that the programme has a significant effect of reducing unemployment duration estimation of an independent competing risks model distinguishing between exits from unemployment to a job a training placement or to signing off unemployment benefit shows that the channels through which restart works differs according to exit type

demographic structure and capital accumulation this paper develops an overlapping generations olg model to analyze the consequences of demographic structure changes induced by an exogenous shift in the birth rate we first show that a finite growth rate of the population that maximizes long run capital per capita exists then we examine the theoretical properties of this growth rate by showing that i it corresponds to the demographic structure such that the average ages of capital holders and workers are equal ii it is associated to an efficient steady state iii it increases with compulsory transfers from younger to older generations finally we explain why standard olg models do not exhibit such a growth rate

on the existence of price equilibria in dynamic economies abstract i extend mckenzie s general characterization of the existence of competitive equilibria in static finite horizon models to a class of dynamic infinite horizon economies that subsumes overlapping generations as a special case with a few necessary exceptions the assumptions employed in my existence proof are natural extensions of mckenzie s in particular i strengthen the existing literature by imposing mckenzie type irreducibility only on the whole economy and not on certain artificial sub economies and by imposing mckenzie s weak continuity and convexity conditions i also establish the general existence of equilibria with nominal government surplus

edgeworth equilibria in production economies abstract an edgeworth equilibrium is an allocation that belongs to the core of every n fold replica of the economy in this work we study the properties of edgeworth equilibria for economies with production and infinite dimensional commodity spaces under some relatively mild conditions we establish among other things that 1 edgeworth equilibria exist 2 every edgeworth equilibrium is a quasi equilibrium and 3 an allocation is an edgeworth equilibrium if and only if it can be decentralized by a price system

the existence of competitive equilibrium over an infinite horizon with production and general consumption sets although many theorems have been proved on the existence of competitive equilibrium in production economies with an infinite set of goods and a finite set of consumers nearly all suff er from a major defect the consumption possibility sets are required t o equal the positive orthant this rules out trade in personal service s and it does not allow for substitutions between goods on the subsistence boundary using methods similar to b peleg and m e yaari 1970 the authors show both equilibrium existence and core equivalence for economies with production and general consumption sets copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

prosperity and depression prosperity and depression are relative concepts today both france and japan are depressed relative to the united states equivalently the united states is prosperous relative to these countries i say these countries are depressed relative to the united states because their output per working age person is 30 percent less than the u s level an interesting and important policy question is why are these countries depressed the answers for these two countries turn out to be very different the united states is prosperous relative to france because the u s intratemporal tax wedge that distorts the trade off between consumption and leisure is much smaller than the french wedge i will show that if france modified its intratemporal tax wedge so that its value was the same as the u s value french welfare in consumption equivalents would increase by 19 percent consumption would have to increase by 19 percent now and in all future periods to achieve as large a welfare gain as that resulting from this tax reform the united states is prosperous relative to japan because production efficiency is higher in the united states in the united states total factor productivity is approximately 20 percent higher than in japan if japan suddenly became as efficient in production as the united states its welfare gain in consumption equivalents would be 39 percent equally interesting and important are big changes over time in relative output per working age person across countries why are new zealand s and switzerland s economies depressed by over 30 percent relative to their 1970 trend corrected levels both of these countries have small populations but depressions are not restricted to small countries japan with its 125 million people is now depressed by 20 percent relative to its 1991 trend corrected level on the prosperity side why are ireland and south korea so prosperous now relative to their 1970 trend corrected levels this lecture is concerned primarily with big international differences among relatively rich industrial countries and changes in these differences over time the countries that receive primary attention all have market economies and healthy well educated populations in the countries considered the variations in aggregate output per working age person are large and reasonably good measures of the factor inputs are available this permits in many cases the identification of the change in policy or the difference in policy that gave rise to prosperity or depression this is in contrast to business cycle theory which provides little guidance to policy except for the important policy implication that a stabilization effort will have either no effect or a perverse effect the output variations studied and analyzed in this lecture are big an order of magnitude larger than the much studied business cycle fluctuations the variations studied however are an order of magnitude smaller than the muchstudied differences between the richest and poorest countries surprisingly only recently have depressions been systematically studied from the perspective of growth theory which is the theory used university of minnesota and federal reserve bank of minneapolis i thank my colleagues at the university of minnesota and the federal reserve bank of minneapolis for helpful discussions and comments in particular i thank tim kehoe ellen mcgrattan and nancy stokey for their help i also thank martin weale and franck portier for providing some british and french tax information used in this lecture thanks also go to sami alpanda and james macgee for research assistance and helpful discussions this lecture draws heavily on collaborative research with fumio hayashi i thank the economic and social research institute cabinet office government of japan and the u s national science foundation for financial support the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system

equilibrium existence in an overlapping generations model with altruistic preferences abstract we prove the existence of a competitive equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with altruistic preferences and nonnegative bequests in equilibrium some sequences of agents of successive generations may be continually linked by positive bequests and act as infinitely lived agents other sequences of agents may not be so linked and therefore behave as sequences of finite lived agents thus this paper adds to the literature on competitive equilibrium in dynamic models by endogenising the mix of finite and infinitely lived agents we also discuss optimality and provide some examples which exhibit interesting equilibria

effects of unemployment insurance work search requirements the maryland experiment this paper describes findings from a 1994 experimental evaluation of alternative work search requirements in the unemployment insurance ui program requiring additional employer contacts or verification of contacts reduced ui receipt by one week and 115 per claimant because these additional requirements did not entail additional re employment services the ui spell reduction can be attributed to increased non monetary costs for remaining on ui a job search workshop requirement reduced ui receipt by half a week and 75 per claimant and additional results indicate that the effects were due to increased costs of continued ui receipt rather than to enhanced job search productivity these treatments did not affect employment or earnings implying that reduced ui duration led to more intensive job search rather than a reduction in the reservation wage in contrast elimination of the employer contact requirement increased ui receipt and post ui earnings suggesting that delayed exit from ui improved job matches he unemployment insurance ui program is designed to provide temporary income support to involuntarily unemployed individuals while they search for work although the ui program provides only temporary income support for the involuntarily unemployed it can reduce the incentive to seek employment because ui benefits reduce the cost of being unemployed resulting in an increase in the reservation wage and longer spells of unemployment to partially offset the negative impact ui benefits have onjob search state ui programs typically impose work search requirements for continued benefit receipt

taking the pulse of the economy measuring gdp national income and product accounts best known by one of their principle aggregates gross domestic product gdp are produced by virtually every nation in the world simon kuznets and richard stone both later to become nobel prize winners led the creation of the national accounts for the united states and the united kingdom respectively so what exactly does gdp measure how is it constructed why do the gdp and other national accounts estimates sometimes present a different picture of the economy than other economic indicators this article is intended to help answer these questions by providing a broad overview of the measurement techniques used in estimating gdp and the national accounts in the united states in the united states the gdp and the national accounts estimates are fundamentally based on detailed economic census data and other information that is available only once every five years the challenge lies in developing a framework and methods that take these economic census data and combine them using a mosaic of monthly quarterly and annual economic indicators to produce quarterly and annual gdp estimates for example one problem is that the other economic indicators that are used to extrapolate gdp in between the five year economic census data such as retail sales housing starts and manufacturers shipments of capital goods are often collected for purposes other than estimating gdp and

retrospectives lionel w mckenzie and the proof of the existence of a competitive equilibrium the theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth century economics the discovery is commonly attributed to a paper by eventual nobel prize winners kenneth arrow and gerard debreau existence of an equilibrium for a competitive economy published in the july 1954 issue of econometrica however it is less well known that lionel mckenzie published a paper in the previous issue of econometrica on equilibrium in graham s model of world trade and other competitive systems that discussed many of the same themes both papers established the existence of a competitive equilibrium for suitable general equilibrium models and employed fixed point theorem arguments mckenzie had priority in publication in 1954 and received credit for simultaneous discovery in prominent sources around that time but over the years mckenzie s role in creating the proof of the existence of a general equilibrium seems to have faded from the collective consciousness of the economics profession newly available archival material permits a reexamination of the events surrounding the publication of both econometrica papers in 1954 the story raises general issues concerning simultaneous discovery priority and credit in economic research and opens a window into some academic practices of that time

structural change in advanced nations a new set of stylised facts we provide new evidence on patterns of structural change in advanced economies reconsidering the stylised facts put forward by kaldor 1963 kuznets 1971 and maddison 1980 since 1980 the services sector has overwhelmingly predominated in the economic activity of the european union japan and the us but there is substantial heterogeneity among services personal finance and business services have low productivity growth and increasing shares in employment and gdp by contrast shares of distribution services are constant and productivity growth is rapid we find that the labour share in value added is declining while the use of ict capital and skilled labour is increasing in all sectors and regions

poverty human development and growth an emerging consensus this paper considers several issues relevant to the debate on the extent to which poverty or development progress in general should be measured by income or by a broader set of objectives issues covered here are practical implications of the two approaches for poverty reduction efforts the impact of growth on basic social indicators and how national achievement on social indicators is best measured sri lanka and pakistan countries often cited in this debate are used as examples

equilibrium for overlapping generations in continuous time abstract we prove the existence of general equilibrium for continuous time overlapping generations models previous theorems exclude all non linear c e s and von neumann morgenstern preferences and exclude production our primitive assumptions are satisfied by such preferences and by all markovian production technologies satisfying bewley s assumptions for arrow debreu models provided that storage is possible at some finite rate of depreciation and some positive capacity a non existence example shows our markovian and storage assumptions cannot be dropped journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 d51 d90

the development and structure of financial systems abstract firms raise external finance via monitored bank loans and non monitored borrowing in a dynamic general equilibrium model access to credit and each type of financing depend on the wealth distribution due to moral hazard we study the depth of credit markets financial development and conditions under which the financial system relies more on either type of external finance financial structure initial inequality investment size and institutional factors determine the level of financial development while financial structure is shaped by the investment technology and legal and financial institutions the model s predictions are consistent with historical and recent development experience

the recursive core core allocations may be defined for infinite horizon capital accumulation models if agents cannot trust each other in the sense of gale then agents may renege on their commitments their decisions appear time inconsistent a core allocation is a recursive core allocation provided no coalition can improve upon its consumption stream at any time given its accumulation of assets up to that period we show for every allocation of consumption in the initial core one can find a distribution of capital stocks among the agents where no coalition of agents will break the initial core contract at any date it follows that if the proper distribution of the streams of capital is achieved then the allocation in the core is also in the recursive core the latter therefore forges a link between the distribution of wealth capital the problem of trust and time consistent intertemporal contracts

courses or individual counselling does job search assistance work how does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long term unemployed people we investigate whether job search assistance jsa helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal to evaluate individual employment effects we apply a quasi experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods we compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the german federal employment agency when comparing participants to nonparticipants results suggest that the individual jsa does not affect participants employment prospects at all and that the course jsa even decreased their employment chances at the same time differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants therefore we compare both progr

innovation and productivity growth the puzzle confronting economists has been that the rate of growth of output that was being observed has been much larger than the rate of increase in the principal resources that were being measured it is now clear that this puzzle is of our own making because we have been using measures of capital and labor which had been refined and narrowed in ways that excluded many of the improvements that have been made in the quality of these resources theodore w schultz 1962

the transatlantic productivity gap a survey of the main causes abstract during the last 2 decades europe s economy experienced a productivity slowdown whereas the united states us economy exhibited a marked acceleration the result is that since the early 1990s the relative productivity levels between the two regions have continuously diverged leading to a transatlantic productivity gap much of the explanation for this is the strong performance of the us in the so called new economy or knowledge economy and in particular the underinvestment in r d and as a result productivity and innovation has been at the forefront in the european policy agenda however various explanations for the us european union transatlantic productivity gap suggest that the picture is rather more complex than simply the effects on or the result of particular technology driven sectors

patterns of state productivity growth in the u s farm sector linking state and aggregate models this article focuses on agricultural productivity growth at both sector and state levels it does so in a way that preserves the economic integrity of national and state production accounts a model accounting for interstate transactions in farm goods links sectorwide and state specific measures of total factor productivity growth an interesting conclusion is that the smooth persistently positive trend typically observed for farm sector productivity growth masks considerable variation across states and regions the results also indicate that farm sector productivity growth is wholly a function of productivity trends in the individual states interstate shifts in production activity and resource reallocations have had little impact