Since the mid-nineties, U.S. labor productivity outgrows its European counterpart by a wide margin. Several recent studies have found that this result is brought about by relatively few service industries, where productivity growth has accelerated in the U.S., but not so in Europe. Based on this...

The paper reviews the sources of «Upward bias» and «Downward bias» in the USConsumer Price Index (CPI) and discusses the changes the Bureau of Labor Statistics has introduced in order to eliminate them. The remaining biases are quantified. Also, the question is raised how much the changes to...

Macroeconometric policy simulation models allow for an analysis, and, above all, for a quantification of the effects different economic policies have on the various variables that represent the economy. Despite the seminal ‘Lucas critique’ levelled against them, these models are still widely...

The conventional wisdom about Keynes’s Principle of Effective Demand is that it states something about quantities. It is widely held that the Principle determines the levels of output and employment in a world not governed by Say’s Law. This paper argues that the Principle of Effective...

The Review of Political Economy (ROPE) welcomed the year 2009 with an issue in which the first two articles use an interesting yet not very popular modeling framework, namely the aggregate demand/aggregate supply (D/Z) model from Chapter 3 of Keynes’s General Theory. Unfortunately, as I intend...

Keynes’s essay “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output” is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labour. Non-decreasing marginal returns, however, do not sit...