Price Measurements and Their Uses

Price Measurements and Their Uses

Author: Murray F. Foss

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 404

ISBN-13: 0226257320

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In an economy characterized by frequent change in technology, in the types of goods and services purchased, and in the forms of business organization, keeping track of price change continues to pose many difficulties. Price change affects the way we perceive changes in such basic measures as real output, productivity, and living standards. This volume, which brings together academic economists with those responsible for official price indexes, presents outstanding new research on price measurement. Half of the papers focus on prices for mainframe and personal computers, semiconductors, and other high-tech products, using mainly hedonic techniques. The volume includes a panel discussion by distinguished economists about the theoretical and practical considerations of how best to measure price change of capital goods whose quality is changing rapidly. The authors also present new research on more conventional but still unsettled problems in the price field affecting both the consumer and producer price indexes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


The Economics of New Goods

The Economics of New Goods

Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0226074188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.


Technology and Market Structure

Technology and Market Structure

Author: John Sutton

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001-01-26

Total Pages: 700

ISBN-13: 9780262692649

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

John Sutton sets out a unified theory that encompasses two major approaches to studying market, while generating a series of novel predictions as to how markets evolve. Traditionally, the field of industrial organization has relied on two unrelated theories—the cross-section theory and the growth-of-firms theory—to explain cross-industry differences in concentration and within-industry skewness. The two approaches are based on very different mathematical structures and few researchers have attempted to relate them to each other. In this book, John Sutton unifies the two approaches through a theory that rests on three simple principles. The first two, a "survivor principle" that says that firms will not pursue loss-making strategies, and an "arbitrage principle" that says that if a profitable opportunity is available, some firm will take it, suffice to define a set of possible outcomes. The third, the "symmetry principle," says that the strategy used by a new entrant into any submarket depends neither on the entrants identity nor on its history in other submarkets. This allows researchers to bring together the roles of strategic interactions and of independence effects. The result is that the considerations motivating the cross-section tradition and those motivating the growth-of-firms tradition both drop out within a single game-theoretic model. This book follows Sutton's Sunk Costs and Market Structure, published by MIT Press in 1991.


Modern Economics – An Analytical Study, 20th Edition

Modern Economics – An Analytical Study, 20th Edition

Author: Ahuja H.L.

Publisher: S. Chand Publishing

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 1775

ISBN-13: 9352531469

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In its 20th edition, this trusted definitive text is a comprehensive treatise on modern economics. It discusses in detail microeconomics, macroeconomics, monetary theory and policy, international economics, public finance and fiscal policy and above all economics of growth and development. The book has been exhaustively revised to provide students an in-depth understanding of the fundamental concepts and is streamlined to focus on current topics and developments in the field.


Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics

Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics

Author: Horst Hanusch

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 1229

ISBN-13: 1847207014

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics is a cutting-edge collection of specially commissioned contributions highlighting not only the broad scope but also the common ground between all branches of this prolific and fast developing field of economics. For 25 years economists have been investigating industrial dynamics under the heading of neo-Schumpeterian economics, which has itself become a mature and widely acknowledged discipline in the fields of innovation, knowledge, growth and development economics. The Elgar Companion to Neo-Schumpeterian Economics surveys the achievements of the most visible scholars in this area. The contributions to the Companion give both a brief survey on the various fields of neo-Schumpeterian economics as well as insights into recent research at the scientific frontiers. The book also illustrates the potential of neo-Schumpeterian economics to overcome its so far self-imposed restriction to the domains of technology driven industry dynamics, and to become a comprehensive approach in economics suited for the analysis of development processes in all economic domains. Integrating both the public sector and financial markets, the book focusses on the co-evolutionary processes between the different domains. As a roadmap for the development of a comprehensive neo-Schumpeterian theory, the Companion will be an invaluable source of reference for researchers in the fields of industrial dynamics and economic growth, and academics and scholars of economics generally. PhD students will find the Companion an indispensable general introduction to the field of neo-Schumpeterian economics. It will also appeal to politicians and consultants engaged in national and international policy as the Companion deals with the highly important and ever topical phenomena of economic development.


Industrial Organization

Industrial Organization

Author: Don E. Waldman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 758

ISBN-13: 1315510529

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Written solely for the undergraduate audience, Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice, which features early coverage of Antitrust, punctuates its modern introduction to industrial organization with relevant empirical data and case studies to show students how to apply theoretical tools.


Fifty Years of Economic Measurement

Fifty Years of Economic Measurement

Author: Ernst R. Berndt

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0226044319

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume contains papers presented at a conference in May 1988 in Washington, D.C., commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth (CRIW). The call for papers emphasized assessments of broad topics in economic measurement, both conceptual and pragmatic. The organizers desired (and succeeded in obtaining) a mix of papers that, first, illustrate the range of measurement issues that economics as a science must confront and, second, mark major milestones of CRIW accomplishment. The papers concern prices and output (Griliches, Pieper, Triplett) and also the major productive inputs, capital (Hulten) and labor (Hamermesh). Measures of saving, the source of capital accumulation, are covered in one paper (Boskin); measuring productivity, the source of much of the growth in per capita income, is reviewed in another (Jorgenson). The use of economic data in economic policy analysis and in regulation are illustrated in a review of measures of tax burden (Atrostic and Nunns) and in an analysis of the data needed for environmental regulation (Russell and Smith); the adequacy of data for policy analysis is evaluated in a roundtable discussion (chapter 12) involving four distinguished policy analysts with extensive government experience in Washington and Ottawa.