A vast literature in economics has examined the economic progress of African Americans during this century. Most of these studies have focused on income--or on even narrower measures of economic well-being, such as earnings--to assess the extent to which any gains made relative to other racial...

We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and...

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically and the American economy lost many high wage, low- to medium-skill jobs, which had provided middle class incomes to less skilled workers. Increasingly, less skilled workers seemed restricted to low wage jobs lacking union or other...

This paper fruitfully combines two complementary theories: performance measurement and input-output analysis. Our point of departure is the theory of the consumer, who maximizes utility subject to a budget constraint. His well-being can be measured by the change in the consumption bundle, valued...

Debreu's coefficient of resource allocation is freed from individual data requirements. The procedure is shown to be equivalent to the imposition of Leontief preferences. The rate of growth of the modified Debreu coefficient and the Solow residual are shown to add up to TFP growth. This...

Neoclassical economists argue that competition promotes efficiency. They consider technology as given though. In the long run technological progress is an important determinant of the level of welfare and Schumpeter argued that monopoly rents help entrepreneurs to capture the gains of R&D and...

The age structure of capital plays an important role in the measurement of productivity. It has been argued that the slowdown in the 1970's can be ascribed to the aging of the stock of capital. In this paper we incorporate the age structure in productivity measurement. Our final proposition...

Linkages, fields of influence and key sectors are troublesome concepts.

Many economic models (e.g., computable general equilibrium models, econometric input-output models) revolve around a matrix of technical coefficients. However, these matrices can be estimated only once every 5 years as long as they are calculated from input-output tables and these are only...