Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services

Essays in Honor of Zvi Griliches

Ernst R. Berndt, Charles R. Hulten, Ernst R. Berndt, Charles R. Hulten

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780226044491
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226044507
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Prefatory Note
• Acknowledgments
• I. Context and Prologue
• Introduction
• 1. Theory and Measurement: An Essay in Honor of Zvi Griliches
• 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
• 3. Where Does the Time Go? Concepts and Measurement in the American Time Use Survey
• 4. Technology and the Theory of Vintage Aggregation
• 5. Why Do Computers Depreciate?
• 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
• 7. Pricing at the On-Ramp to the Internet: Price Indexes for ISPs during the 1990s
• 8. Different Approaches to Estimating Hedonic Indexes
• 9. Price Indexes for Microsoft’s Personal Computer Software Products
• 10. International Comparisons of R&D Expenditure: Does an R&D PPP Make a Difference?
• IV. Information Technology and the Acceleration of Productivity Growth
• 11. Information Technology and the G7 Economies
• 12. The Role of Semiconductor Inputs in IT Hardware Price Decline: Computers versus Communications
• 13. Computer Input, Computer Networks, and Productivity
• V. Measuring and Modeling Productivity, Consumption, and Diffusion
• 14. Services Productivity in the United States: Griliches’s Services Volume Revisited
• 15. A Consistent Accounting of U.S. Productivity Growth
• 16. Should Exact Index Numbers Have Standard Errors? Theory and Application to Asian Growth
• 17. What Really Happened to Consumption Inequality in the United States?
• 18. Technology Adoption from Hybrid Corn to Beta-Blockers
• VI. EPILOGUE
• 19. Zvi Griliches’s Contributions to Economic Measurement
• Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index