This volume contains papers presented at a conference in May 1988 in Washington, D.C., commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW). The call for papers emphasized assessments of broad topics in economic measurement, both...

New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for...

How is real capital measured by government statistical agencies? How could this measure be improved to correspond more closely to an economist's ideal measure of capital in economic analysis and prediction? It is possible to construct a single, reliable time series for all capital goods,...

There is probably no concept other than saving for which U.S. official agencies issue annual estimates that differ by more than a third, as they have done for net household saving, or for which reputable scholars claim that the correct measure is close to ten times the officially published one....

Modeling the Distribution and Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth; Contents; Introduction; 1. Long-Term Trends in American Wealth Inequality; 2. The Wealth of Testators and Its Distribution: Butler County, Ohio, 1803-65; 3. The Perpetuation of Wealth: A Simulation Model; 4. The Importance of...

Geography and Ownership as Bases for Economic Accounting provides a forum for leading specialists in trade and international economics to explore whether changes in the world economy have increased the usefulness of international accounts drawn up on the basis of ownership rather than on...

Economists wish to compare prices, real income, and output across countries and regions for many purposes. In the past, such comparisons were made in nominal terms, or by using exchange rates across countries, ignoring differences in price levels and thus distorting the results. Great progress...

Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the...

These classic studies of the history of economic change in 19th- and 20th-century United States, Canada, and British West Indies examine national product; capital stock and wealth; and fertility, health, and mortality. "A 'must have' in the library of the serious economic historian."-Samuel...

The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric...