Most Popular Books by Robert J. Gordon

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow''s seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about "how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?" The analysis links periods of slow and rapid growth to the timing of the three industrial revolutions (IR''s), that is, IR #1 (steam, railroads) from 1750 to 1830; IR #2 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) from 1870 to 1900; and IR #3 (computers, the web, mobile phones) from 1960 to present. It provides evidence that IR #2 was more important than the others and was largely responsible for 80 years of relatively rapid productivity growth between 1890 and 1972. Once the spin-off inventions from IR #2 (airplanes, air conditioning, interstate highways) had run their course, productivity growth during 1972-96 was much slower than before. In contrast, IR #3 created only a short-lived growth revival between 1996 and 2004. Many of the original and spin-off inventions of IR #2 could happen only once - urbanization, transportation speed, the freedom of females from the drudgery of carrying to.

"Tenant rental shelter is by far the most important component of the CPI, because it is used as a proxy for owner-occupied housing. This paper develops a wide variety of current and historical evidence dating back to 1914 to demonstrate that the CPI rent index is biased downward for all of the last century. The CPI rises roughly 2 percent per year slower than quality-unadjusted indexes of gross rent, setting a challenge for this research of measuring the rate of quality change in rental apartments. If quality increased at a rate of 2 percent per year, the CPI was not biased downward at all, but if quality increased at a slower rate of 1 percent per year, then the CPI was biased downward at a rate of 1 percent. Our analysis of a rich set of data sources goes backward chronologically, starting with a hedonic regression analysis on a large set of panel data from the American Housing Survey (AHS) covering 1975-2003. Prior to 1975, we have large micro data files from the U. S. Census of Housing extending back to 1930. In addition to the hedonic regression data, we stitch together data on the diffusion of important quality attributes of rental units, including plumbing, heating, and electrification, over the period 1918-73. Our final piece of evidence is based on a study of quality-adjusted rents in a single local community, Evanston IL, covering the period 1925-99.Our overall conclusions are surprisingly consistent across sources and eras, that the CPI bias was roughly -1.0 percent prior to the methodological improvements in the CPI that date from the mid-1980s. Our reliance on a wide variety of methodologies and evidence on types of quality change and their importance, while leaving the outcome still uncertain, at least in our view substantially narrows the range of possibilities regarding the history of CPI bias for rental shelter over the twentieth century"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

This is a review article of a new economic history of the Nazi economy by Adam Tooze which cuts through the debate between economics and Hitler''s mistakes as fundamental causes of the outcome. Instead, Tooze argues that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the inevitable result of Hitler''s paranoia about the land-starved backwardness of German agriculture as contrasted with the raw material and land resources of America''s continent and Britain''s empire. The American frontier expansion that obliterated the native Indians provided Hitler with a explicit precedent, which he often cited, for pushing aside the native populations in the east to provide land for German Aryan farmers.

The uncanny parallel of the stock market boom, bubble, and collapse in 1995-2001 as in 1924-1930, reminds us that business cycles emerge from the complex interplay of multiple factors, not just one.Common elements between the two decades are overshadowed by differences, including the much larger share of agricultural output in the 1920s, the weakness of farm prices throughout the decade, and the role of collapsing farm prices in the pervasive post-1929 downward shift in aggregate demand. Another partly related difference was a high volatility of inventory accumulation that reflected the larger share of agriculture and manufacturing in the economy of the 1920s. Failures of public policy in the 1920s included the absence of deposit insurance, the unit-banking regulations that prevented the diversification of financial risk across regions, and the low margin requirements that exacerbated swings in stock market prices

We examine the role of the ICT revolution in driving productivity growth behavior for the United States and an aggregate of ten Western European nations (the EU-10) from 1977 to 2015. We find that the standard growth accounting approach is deficient when it separates sources of growth between ICT capital deepening and TFP growth, because much of the effect of the ICT revolution was channeled through spillovers to TFP growth rather than being limited to the capital deepening pathway. Using industry-level data from EU KLEMS, we find that most of the 1995-2005 U.S. productivity growth revival was driven by ICT-intensive industries producing market services and computer hardware. In contrast the EU-10 experienced a 1995-2005 growth slowdown due to a paucity of ICT investment, a failure to capture the efficiency benefits of ICT, and performance shortfalls in specific industries including ICT production, finance-insurance, retail-wholesale, and agriculture. After 2005 both the U.S. and the EU-10 suffered a growth slowdown, indicating that the benefits of the ICT revolution were temporary rather than providing a new permanent era of faster productivity growth. This joint transatlantic post-2005 slowdown is consistent with the broader view that ongoing innovation has been less potent in boosting productivity growth compared to earlier decades of the postwar era.

This paper rejects the proposition that there is only a single interesting question to ask about the decade of the 1930s. It is concerned not only with the role of money in the 1929-33 contraction but also with the relative role of monetary and nonmonetary factors in the recession of 1937-38 and subsequent recovery and, in addition, with the division of nominal income change between prices and real output. New empirical evidence bearing on each of these issues is provided The results suggest that both extreme monetarist and nonmonetarist interpretations of the decade of the l930s are unsatisfactory and leave interesting features of the data unexplained. Arguing against acceptance of an extreme monetarist interpretation are (1) the inability of changes in the money supply alone to explain the severity of the initial collapse in income between 1929 and the fall of 1931, (2) the steady weakening of the correlation between changes in nominal income and money as the 1930s progressed, (3) the failure of monetary factors to explain the nature and timing of the 1938-41 recovery, and (4) the apparent absence of any tendency for the mechanism of price flexibility to provide strong self-correcting forces as required by an approach that stresses monetary rules and opposes policy activism. Arguing against acceptance of an extreme nonmonetarist interpretation are (1) the close association between the collapse in income and the lagged effect of monetary changes after the fall of 1931, (2) the milder contraction and earlier recoveries associated with the more expansive monetary policies pursued in Europe, (3) the close association between money and income in the 1937-38 recession, and (4) the failure of the price change data to adhere to the expectational Phillips curve approach imbedded in many postwar econometric models constructed by nonmonetarists

(1) Whatever happened to the cyclical effect? Skeptics were justified on the basis of data through the end of 1999 in their claim that part of the post-1995 productivity growth revival reflected the normal cyclical correlation between productivity and output growth. In contrast data through mid-2003 reveal only a negligible cyclical effect for 1995-99 but rather a temporary bubble in 2002-03. (2) Why did productivity growth accelerate after 2000 when the ICT investment boom was collapsing? The most persuasive argument points to unusually savage corporate cost-cutting and hidden intangible investments in the late 1990s that provided productivity benefits after 2000. (3) The steady decline in the price of computer power implies steady technical progress, but then why did computers produce so little productivity growth before 1995 and so much afterwards? We draw an analogy to electricity, where miniaturization was the key step in making small electric motors practicable, and the internal combustion engine, where complementary investments, especially roads, were necessary to reap benefits. (4) What does the collapse of the investment boom imply about the future of innovation? First-rate inventions in the 1990s, notably the web and user-friendly business productivity software, are being followed by second-rate inventions in the current decade. (5) Finally, why did productivity growth slow down in Europe but accelerate in the U. S.? A consensus is emerging that U. S. institutions foster creative destruction and financial markets that welcome innovation, while Europe remains under the control of corporatist institutions that dampen competition and inhibit new entry. Further, Europe lacks a youth culture like that of the U. S. which fosters independence: U. S. teenagers work after school and college students must work to pay for much of their educational expense. There is a chasm of values across the Atlantic.

A review was conducted of available models which relate ozone concentrations to VOC and NOx emissions. The city-specific version of the Empirical Kinetic Modeling Approach (EKMA) was recommended as the most appropriate model for New England with reasonable input and computer requirements. This model was applied to Bridgeport-New Haven, CT; Providence, RI; Boston, MA; Springfield, MA; and Worcester, MA to compute VOC emission reductions necessary to achieve current and future Federal Oxidant Standards. The ozone design values and transported ozone values were selected to reflect the maximum requirement for VOC emission reduction. All O3 monitoring data for Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island were adjusted to a common basis by taking into account EPA calibration audits and changes in calibration procedures.

Abstract: Traditional Keynesian multipliers assume that there are no capacity constraints to impede a fiscal-driven expansion in aggregate demand. On the contrary, we find ample evidence of capacity constraints in 1941, particularly in the second half of that year. As a result our preferred government spending multiplier is 1.80 when the time period ends in 1941:Q2 but only 0.88 when the time period ends in supply-constrained 1941:Q4. Only the 1.80 multiplier is relevant to situations like 2009-10 when capacity constraints are absent across the economy

The most striking aspects of recent U.S. wage and price behavior are the small year-to-year variations in the rate of change of wages, the modest 1977-79 acceleration in the rate of change of both wages and the consumption deflator net of food and energy, and an unprecedented gap between the inflation rates recorded by the CPI and personal consumption deflator. A small and simple econometric model is used to forecast the consequences of various policies for the future growth of the monetary base. No policy will be able to prevent an acceleration in the growth rate of the personal consumption deflator net of food and energy from its recent 7 percent track to 8 percent or above in the first half of 1980. The gross personal consumption deflator will climb even faster, with the difference depending on the behavior of oil and food prices. Thereafter, the effect of slack labor markets will begin to allow inflation net of food and energy to decelerate substantially. A 6 percent rule for the monetary base is too conservative and causes the unemployment rate to rise to 8.5 percent in 1982. An 8 percent rule for the base is preferable, allows the unemployment rate to begin to fall after late 1981, and still achieves a deceleration of inflation net of food and energy from 8 percent in mid-1980 to 6 percent in 1983. Thereafter, the growth of the base should be slowed down to keep the economy from overshooting again