Some analysts see the expansion of the 1990s as uniquely long and strong. Moreover, according to one popular view, the noninflationary boom can continue indefinitely. To shed some light on this debate, this paper compares the 1990s systematically with two previous long economic expansions, using...

Calls for workforce diversity abound; arguments in support of diversity at the workplace suggest that we are a better society when we work together. In a recent opinion poll, 81% of respondents said that it is somewhat or very important “to have employees of different races, cultures and...

A major shortcoming of the U.S. leading index is that it does not use the most recent information for stock prices and yield spreads. The index methodology ignores these data in favor of a time-consistent set of components (i.e., all of the components must refer to the previous month). An...

This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a "vintage effect" as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a "survival effect" as the change in productivity of a...

This paper examines the empirical implications of aggregation bias when measuring the productive impact of computers. To isolate two specific aggregation problems relating to "aggregation in variables" and "aggregation in relations," we compare various production function estimates across a...

In recent years, U.S. productivity growth accelerated sharply in manufacturing, but has remained sluggish in the most computer-intensive service industries. This paper explores the possibility that information technology is generating output that is increasingly hard to measure in...