This Economic Commentary confirms that productivity growth has been unusually robust over the last few years and explores reasonable assumptions about the likely future pattern of productivity growth. These assumptions can generate substantially different productivity growth paths. Government...

Compares two possible explanations of why pay increases continue to be moderate in a vigorous labor market--workers' uncertainty about their jobs and human resource managers' wage-setting behavior--and looks at how each explanation matches the evidence on the timing of inflation and wage changes.

An examination of the problems that arise when the government attempts to formulate economic policies having multiple objectives--in this case, reducing the nation's energy consumption and its associated social costs while ensuring that no particular region or income group bears a...

A study that disputes recent reports claiming that undesirable and low-paying part-time jobs are overtaking full-time work, explaining how these reports overlook expansion in the labor force, confuse establishment and household data, and disregard differences in worker characteristics that can...

An argument that the wage gap between the service-producing and goods-producing sectors has narrowed to the point that the service industries now offer wage opportunities very similar to those in manufacturing and construction.

An appraisal of the health of the national economy based on the final state employment figures for 1995. The authors find that although employment growth has tapered off throughout the United States, there is no definitive evidence of a national recession in the near term.

Labor productivity growth is generally acknowledged to be procyclical. The author reviews the leading explanations for this, then uses two approaches to compare the time pattern of productivity gains over the business cycle. One approach describes the pattern in terms of the number of quarters...

Even as per capita income has increased across the United States, differences among states’ incomes remain. What are the sources of these remaining differences? This Commentary identifies and analyzes the key factors—patents, educational attainment, and industry structure—that influence...

The U.S. economy's recent extraordinary performance has led some to claim that trend output growth is accelerating to a much higher rate than any we have experienced in a quarter century; they also maintain that the signs of productivity's acceleration have been masked by measurement problems....

An analysis of slower-than-normal employment growth in the post-1991 economic recovery, examining trends at both the state and national level and finding a widespread weakness in the rate of job addition in growing industries, rather than an unusually high job deletion rate in contracting...