Search Results
Working Paper
A dissection of personal saving behavior
Journal Article
The recovery of durable goods: what exhilarated the consumer?
An analysis of the fundamental determinants of consumer spending on postponable, high-durability goods, such as autos and household equipment, with a discussion of how these determinants apply during 1983-84.
Working Paper
A primer on the macroeconomic implications of population aging
The composition of the U.S. population will change significantly in coming decades as the decline in fertility rates following the baby boom, coupled with increasing longevity, leads to an older population. This demographic shift will likely have a dramatic effect on the long-run prospects for living standards. Moreover, as has been widely discussed in the media and by policymakers, population aging also has significant implications for social programs for the elderly, such as Social Security and Medicare. In this paper, we discuss the consequences of population aging from a macroeconomic ...
Discussion Paper
Decomposition of productivity and unit costs
Working Paper
The contribution of multinational corporations to U.S. productivity growth, 1977-2000
In this paper, we decompose aggregate labor productivity growth in order to gauge the relative importance of multinational corporations (MNCs) to the economic performance of the United States in the 1990s. As we define it, the MNC sector refers to the U.S. activities of multinational corporations operating in the United States. We develop productivity estimates for MNCs using (1) published and unpublished industry-level data from two surveys conducted by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and (2) productivity data for industries and major sectors from the FRB productivity system (Bartelsman and ...
Working Paper
Recent trends in compensation practices
According to some accounts, compensation practices have recently been undergoing marked changes, with an increasing number of firms said to be substituting lump-sum payments for regular pay increases, allowing for greater variability of remuneration across individuals or groups, and making greater use of profit sharing or stock options. Many of these practices are outside the scope of the typical measures of economy-wide compensation growth. Moreover, intensified use of these schemes ought to heighten the responsiveness of overall compensation costs to business conditions and could also, in ...