front cover of Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services
Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services
Essays in Honor of Zvi Griliches
Edited by Ernst E. Berndt and Charles R. Hulten
University of Chicago Press, 2007

The celebrated economist Zvi Griliches’s entire career can be viewed as an attempt to advance the cause of accuracy in economic measurement. His interest in the causes and consequences of technical progress led to his pathbreaking work on price hedonics, now the principal analytical technique available to account for changes in product quality.

Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services, a collection of papers from an NBER conference held in Griliches’s honor, is a tribute to his many contributions to current economic thought. Here, leading scholars of economic measurement address issues in the areas of productivity, price hedonics, capital measurement, diffusion of new technologies, and output and price measurement in “hard-to-measure” sectors of the economy.  Furthering Griliches’s vital work that changed the way economists think about the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts, this volume is essential for all those interested in the labor market, economic growth, production, and real output.

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Output Measurement in the Service Sectors
Edited by Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1992
Is the fall in overall productivity growth in the United States and other developed countries related to the rising share of the service sectors in the economy? Since services represent well over half of the U.S. gross national product, it is also important to ask whether these sectors have had a slow rate of growth, as this would act as a major drag on the productivity growth of the overall economy and on its competitive performance. In this timely volume, leading experts from government and academia argue that faulty statistics have prevented a clear understanding of these issues.
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Patents, Invention, and Economic Change
Data and Selected Essays
Jacob Schmookler
Harvard University Press, 1972

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Price Indexes and Quality Change
Studies in New Methods of Measurement
Zvi Griliches
Harvard University Press, 1971

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R&D, Education, and Productivity
A Retrospective
Zvi Griliches
Harvard University Press, 2000

Zvi Griliches was a modern master of empirical economics. In this short book, he recounts what he and others have learned about the sources of economic growth. This book conveys the way he tackled research problems. For Griliches, economic theorizing without measurement is merely the fashioning of parables, but measurement without theory is blind. Judgment enables one to strike the right balance.

The book begins with economists' first attempts to measure productivity growth systematically in the 1930s. In the mid-1950s these efforts culminated in a startling puzzle. The growth of measured inputs like labor and capital explained only a fraction of the growth of national output. Economists called this phenomenon "efficiency" or "technical change" or "the residual." However, Griliches observes that the most accurate name was a "measure of our ignorance." What explained the rest of economic growth quickly became one of the most important questions in economics.

Over the next thirty years, Griliches and his colleagues and students looked for various components of the residual in education (the formation of human capital), investment (the formation of physical capital), and research and development. In 1973, after the oil price shocks, productivity growth slowed and the residual almost disappeared. Since the shocks were a short-term phenomenon, they could not account for the slowdown. A main focus of this book is therefore the puzzle of the productivity slowdown and how to date it and how to explain it.

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R&D and Productivity
The Econometric Evidence
Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1998
Zvi Griliches, a world-renowned pioneer in the field of productivity growth, has compiled in a single volume his pathbreaking research on R&D and productivity. Griliches addresses the relationship between research and development (R&D) and productivity, one of the most complex yet vital issues in today's business world. Using econometric techniques, he establishes this connection and measures its magnitude for firm-, industry-, and economy-level data.

Griliches began his studies of productivity growth during the 1950s, adding a variable of "knowledge stock" to traditional production function models, and his work has served as the point of departure for much of the research into R&D and productivity. This collection of essays documents both Griliches's distinguished career as well as the history of this line of thought.

As inputs into production increasingly taking the form of "intellectual capital" and new technologies that are not as easily measured as traditional labor and capital, the methods Griliches has refined and applied to R&D become crucial to understanding today's economy.

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R&D, Patents and Productivity
Edited by Zvi Griliches
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"An essential reference for specialists in the economics of technological change."--D. G. McFertridge, Canadian Journal of Economics
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