The Norwegian productivity puzzle is rooted in three seemingly contradictory "facts": First, Norway is one of the most productive OECD countries. Second, Norway has experienced high growth in productivity. Third, Norway has a relatively low level of R&D intensity. In this article, I show that...

The purpose of this paper is to build consistent, integrated datasets to investigate whether various disaggregated data can shed light on the possible sources of the statistical discrepancy. Our strategy is first to use disaggregated data to estimate consistent sets of input-output models that...

The 'Arbeitskreis Volkswirtschaftliche Gesamtrechnung der Länder' now publishes figures concerning the value added in Germany. Formerly the Statistische Bundesamt had this assignment. Some corporations have plant locations in the new Länder as well as in the old Länder. The employed method...

Das Statistische Bundesamt weist seit der großen Revision 2005 in den Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen (VGR) die Entwicklung des realen Bruttoinlandsprodukts und seiner Komponenten auf Vorjahrespreisbasis aus. Durch Verkettung (»Chain-Linking«) werden die zunächst unvergleichbaren...

The recent changes in the national accounts unequivocally imply that the nature of the measured growth rate and business cycle has changed. This note investigates to what extent.

Using unit labor cost (ULC) data from Euro area countries as well as US States and German L¨ander we investigate inflation convergence using different approaches, namely panel unit root tests, cointegration tests and error-correction models. All in all we cannot reject convergence of ULC growth...

I argue that the rule of law consists of many dimensions and that much information is lost when variables proxying for these dimensions are simply aggregated. I draw on the most important innovations from various legal traditions to propose a concept of the rule of law likely to find general...

In this paper we compare alternative approaches for the construction of time series of macroeconomic variables for Unified Germany prior to 1991, and then use them for the construction of corresponding time series for the euro area. The resulting series for Germany and the euro area are compared...