Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services
Essays in Honor of Zvi Griliches
Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services
Essays in Honor of Zvi Griliches
The celebrated economist Zvi Griliches’s entire career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the cause of accuracy in economic measurement. His interest in the causes and consequences of technical progress led to his pathbreaking work on price hedonics, now the principal analytical technique available to account for changes in product quality.
Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services, a collection of papers from an NBER conference held in Griliches’s honor, is a tribute to his many contributions to current economic thought. Here, leading scholars of economic measurement address issues in the areas of productivity, price hedonics, capital measurement, diffusion of new technologies, and output and price measurement in “hard-to-measure” sectors of the economy. Furthering Griliches’s vital work that changed the way economists think about the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, this volume is essential for all those interested in the labor market, economic growth, production, and real output.
496 pages | 46 line drawings, 136 tables | 6 x 9 | © 2007
National Bureau of Economic Research Studies in Income and Wealth
Economics and Business: Business--Industry and Labor, Economics--Development, Growth, Planning, Economics--Econometrics and Statistics, Economics--General Theory and Principles, Economics--International and Comparative
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
I. CONTEXT AND PROLOGUE
Introduction
Ernst R. Berndt and Charles R. Hulten
1. Theory and Measurement: An Essay in Honor of Zvi Griliches
Charles R. Hulten
II. CLASSIC INPUT MEASUREMENT ISSUES REVISITED
2. Production Function and Wage Equation Estimation with Heterogeneous Labor: Evidence from a New Matched Employer-Employee Data Set
Judith K. Hellerstein and David Neumark
3. Where Does the Time Go? Concepts and Measurement in the American Time Use Survey
Harley Frazis and Jay Stewart
4. Technology and the Theory of Vintage Aggregation
Michael J. Harper
5. Why Do Computers Depreciate?
Michael J. Geske, Valerie A. Ramey, and Matthew D. Shapiro
III. QUALITY ADJUSTMENT AND PRICE MEASUREMENT ISSUES: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
6. Downward Bias in the Most Important CPI Component: The Case of Rental Shelter, 1914-2003
Robert J. Gordon and Todd vanGoethem
7. Pricing at the On-Ramp to the Internet: Price Indexes for ISPs during the 1990s
Greg Stranger and Shane Greenstein
8. Different Approaches to Estimating Hedonic Indexes
Saeed Heravi and Mick Silver
9. Price Indexes for Microsoft’s Personal Computer Software Products
Jaison R. Abel, Ernst R. Berndt, and Alan G. White
10. International Comparisons of R&D Expenditure: Does an R&D PPP Make a Difference?
Sean M. Dougherty, Robert Inklaar, Robert H. McGuckin, and Bart van Ark
IV. INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND THE ACCELERATION OF PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH
11. Information Technology and the G7 Economies
Dale W. Jorgensen
12. The Role of Semiconductor Inputs in IT Hardware Price Decline: Computers versus Communications
Ana Aizcorbe, Kenneth Flamm, and Anjum Khurshid
13. Computer Input, Computer Networks, and Productivity
B. K. Atrostic and Sang Nguyen
V. MEASURING AND MODELING PRODUCTIVITY, CONSUMPTION, AND DIFFUSION
14. Services Productivity in the United States: Griliches’s Services Volume Revisited
Barry P. Bosworth and Jack E. Triplett
15. A Consistent Accounting of U.S. Productivity Growth
Eric J. Bartlesman and J. Joseph Beaulieu
16. Should Exact Index Numbers Have Standard Errors? Theory and Application to Asian Growth
Robert C. Feenstra and Marchall B. Reinsdorf
17. What Really Happened to Consumption Inequality in the United States?
Orazio Attanasio, Erich Battistin, and Hidehiko Ichimura
18. Technology Adoption from Hybrid Corn to Beta-Blockers
Jonathan Skinner and Douglas Staiger
VI. EPILOGUE
19. Zvi Griliches’s Contributions to Economic Measurement
Jack E. Triplett
Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index