We use modern household data and econometric methods to conduct some of the original tests of the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) suggested and used by Friedman (1957). The data and methods are superior to those available to Friedman, allowing us to refine Friedman’s tests and perform tests...

This paper tests the prediction of the Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) that news about future income induce a revision in consumption equal to the revision in permanent income. We use time-series data from 48 contiguous US states to perform the test. The empirical results provide some support...

This paper exploits the dual accounting technique to uncover multi-factor productivity growth patterns for goods and services across US states from 1980 to 2007. Due to changes in sectoral classifications, the period is divided into two parts, 1980-1997 and 1998-2007. Over both periods, states...

Despite being located within a well integrated economy such as the US, its states exhibit considerable heterogeneity, both in the composition of output and in sectoral labor productivity growth. In this paper, we examine the sources of uneven labor productivity growth across sectors in US...

We revisit the idea that colonized countries that were more (less) economically advanced in 1500 became poorer (richer, respectively) by the late 20th century. Using data on place of origin of today’s country populations and the urbanization and population density measures used by Acemoglu et...

Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country’s ability to absorb and implement...

In this paper, we compare the relative roles of multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth and factor accumulation in goods and services for states in the US from 1980 to 2007 using the dual growth accounting framework. We find that while MFP growth was relatively high, and converged in the goods...