National statistical agencies frequently assume very high geometric depreciation rates in order to capture the fact that computers are usually retired after 3 or 4 years of use. However, typically the service flow that a computer generates over its useful life is roughly constant, which...

The paper studies the problems associated with the construction of price indexes for commercial properties that could be used in the System of National Accounts. Property price indexes are required for the stocks of commercial properties in the Balance Sheets of the country and related price...

It is very desirable to find flexible functional forms for unit cost (or profit) functions that are globally concave (or convex). It is easy to find flexible functional forms that are locally well behaved but do not satisfy the required regularity conditions globally. This note examines the...

Caves, Christensen, Diewert introduced Malmquist output, input and productivity indexes into production theory in a systematic way. This paper revisits the debate on how to decompose Bjurek’s concept of a Malmquist productivity index into explanatory factors, with a focus on extracting...

The paper illustrates how various commonly used index number formulae perform using monthly data on seasonal commodities (seven types of vegetable) that was collected by the Israeli Consumer Price Index program. The paper calculates standard Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher indexes (fixed base and...

An earlier paper by Diewert (2013) provided some new decompositions of economy wide labour productivity growth and Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth into sectoral effects. The economy wide labour productivity growth rate turned out to depend on the sectoral labour productivity growth rates,...

The paper considers some of the problems associated with the indirectly measured components of financial service outputs in the System of National Accounts (SNA), termed FISIM (Financial Intermediation Services Indirectly Measured). The paper considers how to integrate financial transactions...

The paper obtains relatively simple exact expressions that relate value added Total Factor Productivity growth (TFP growth or Multifactor Productivity Growth) in a value added framework to the corresponding measures of TFP growth in a gross output framework when Laspeyres or Paasche indexes are...

The paper addresses two problems: (i) how to measure aggregate real output and inflation for a group of countries and (ii) how to construct measures of real GDP for a group of countries where the country measures of real GDP are comparable across time and space. In order to address the second...

Contingent sovereign debt can create important welfare gains. Nonetheless, there is almost no issuance today. Using hand-collected archival data, we examine the first known case of large-scale use of state-contingent sovereign debt in history. Philip II of Spain entered into hundreds of...