Results by title

26 books match the query 'Econometrics'

cover of A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics: Testing Policy Ineffectiveness and Efficient-Markets Models

A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics

Testing Policy Ineffectiveness and Efficient-Markets Models

Frederic S. Mishkin

University of Chicago Press, 1983

A Rational Expectations Approach to Macroeconometrics pursues a rational expectations approach to the estimation of a class of models widely discussed in the macroeconomics and finance literature: those which emphasize the effects from unanticipated, rather than anticipated, movements in variables. In this volume, Fredrick S. Mishkin first theoretically develops and discusses a unified econometric treatment of these models and then shows how to estimate them with an annotated computer program.
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cover of Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics

Big Data for Twenty-First-Century Economic Statistics

Edited by Katharine G. Abraham, Ron S. Jarmin, Brian C. Moyer, and Matthew D. Shapiro

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The papers in this volume analyze the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement. 

The existing infrastructure for the production of key economic statistics relies heavily on data collected through sample surveys and periodic censuses, together with administrative records generated in connection with tax administration. The increasing difficulty of obtaining survey and census responses threatens the viability of existing data collection approaches. The growing availability of new sources of Big Data—such as scanner data on purchases, credit card transaction records, payroll information, and prices of various goods scraped from the websites of online sellers—has changed the data landscape. These new sources of data hold the promise of allowing the statistical agencies to produce more accurate, more disaggregated, and more timely economic data to meet the needs of policymakers and other data users. This volume documents progress made toward that goal and the challenges to be overcome to realize the full potential of Big Data in the production of economic statistics. It describes the deployment of Big Data to solve both existing and novel challenges in economic measurement, and it will be of interest to statistical agency staff, academic researchers, and serious users of economic statistics.
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cover of Data Privacy Protection and the Conduct of Applied Research: Methods, Approaches, and New Findings

Data Privacy Protection and the Conduct of Applied Research

Methods, Approaches, and New Findings

Edited by V. Joseph Hotz, Ruobin Gong, and Ian M. Schmutte

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A necessary exploration into the mechanics of data privacy protections within empirical social science research.

The explosion of computational power and data availability has revolutionized empirical social science research, but it has also created unprecedented challenges for protecting the privacy of individuals and businesses. As computational tools make it increasingly possible to breach data anonymity in government surveys by combining the survey data with additional information from external sources, statistical agencies face mounting pressure to develop new privacy protection methods while maintaining data quality essential for research and policymaking. This volume explores how innovations in data privacy protection, including differential privacy and synthetic data methods, affect the conduct of empirical analysis in economics, computer science, and statistics. Contributors explore critical questions about the trade-offs between privacy and data usability: How do new protection methods impact statistical inference and parameter estimation? What standards should data providers adopt? The chapters examine frameworks for characterizing privacy protection, disclosure limitation challenges for survey data, methodological innovations for privacy-preserving statistical analysis, regulatory considerations in modern data governance, and strategies for balancing confidentiality with research access.

This volume provides researchers, statistical agencies, and policymakers with essential guidance for navigating the complex landscape where data protection meets scientific inquiry.

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cover of Elements of Econometrics: Second Edition

Elements of Econometrics

Second Edition

Jan Kmenta

University of Michigan Press, 1997

This classic text has proven its worth in university classrooms and as a tool kit in research--selling over 40,000 copies in the United States and abroad in its first edition alone. Users have included undergraduate and graduate students of economics and business, and students and researchers in political science, sociology, and other fields where regression models and their extensions are relevant. The book has also served as a handy reference in the "real world" for people who need a clear and accurate explanation of techniques that are used in empirical research.
Throughout the book the emphasis is on simplification whenever possible, assuming the readers know college algebra and basic calculus. Jan Kmenta explains all methods within the simplest framework, and generalizations are presented as logical extensions of simple cases. And while a relatively high degree of rigor is preserved, every conflict between rigor and clarity is resolved in favor of the latter. Apart from its clear exposition, the book's strength lies in emphasizing the basic ideas rather than just presenting formulas to learn and rules to apply.
The book consists of two parts, which could be considered jointly or separately. Part one covers the basic elements of the theory of statistics and provides readers with a good understanding of the process of scientific generalization from incomplete information. Part two contains a thorough exposition of all basic econometric methods and includes some of the more recent developments in several areas.
As a textbook, Elements of Econometrics is intended for upper-level undergraduate and master's degree courses and may usefully serve as a supplement for traditional Ph.D. courses in econometrics. Researchers in the social sciences will find it an invaluable reference tool.
A solutions manual is also available for teachers who adopt the text for coursework.
Jan Kmenta is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Statistics, University of Michigan.
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cover of Elements of Time Series Econometrics: An Applied Approach - Third Edition

Elements of Time Series Econometrics

An Applied Approach - Third Edition

Evzen Kocenda and Alexandr Cerný

Karolinum Press, 2017

A time series is a sequence of numbers collected at regular intervals over a period of time. Designed with emphasis on the practical application of theoretical tools, Elements of Time Series Econometrics is an approachable guide for the econometric analysis of time series. The text is divided into five major sections. The first section, “The Nature of Time Series,” gives an introduction to time series analysis. The next section, “Difference Equations,” describes briefly the theory of difference equations, with an emphasis on results that are important for time series econometrics. The third section, “Univariate Time Series,” presents the methods commonly used in univariate time series analysis, the analysis of time series of a single variable. The fourth section, “Multiple Time Series,” deals with time series models of multiple interrelated variables. The final section, new to this edition, is “Panel Data and Unit Root Tests” and deals with methods known as panel unit root tests that are relevant to issues of convergence. Appendices contain an introduction to simulation techniques and statistical tables.
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cover of Experimental Economics: Theory and Practice

Experimental Economics

Theory and Practice

John A. List

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A landmark practical guide from the twenty-first-century pioneer in economics.

Experimental economics—generating and interpreting data to understand human decisions, motivations, and outcomes—is today all but synonymous with economics as a discipline. The advantages of the experimental method for understanding causal effects make it the gold standard for an increasingly empirical field. But until now the discipline has lacked comprehensive and definitive guidance for how to optimally design and conduct economic experiments.

For more than 30 years, John A. List has been at the forefront of using experiments to advance economic knowledge, expanding the domain of economic experiments from the lab to the real-world. Experimental Economics is his A-to-Z compendium for students and researchers on the ground floor of designing, conducting, analyzing, and interpreting data that they generate. List seeks not only to guide readers on how to develop and implement their experimental projects—everything from design to administrative and ethical considerations—but to help them avoid all the mistakes he’s made in his career, too. Experimental Economics codifies its author’s refined approach to the design, execution, and analysis of laboratory and field experiments. It is a milestone work poised to become the definitive reference for the next century of economics (and economists).

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cover of Hard-to-Measure Goods and Services: Essays in Honor of Zvi Griliches

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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cover of Histories on Econometrics, Volume 43

Histories on Econometrics, Volume 43

Marcel Boumans, Ariane Dupont-Kieffer, Dou Qin, editors

Duke University Press, 0

This volume considers the history of econometrics, a field of economics that combines statistics, mathematics, and economic theory. Contributors scrutinize accounts of the field’s shifting boundaries and the development of a cohesive scholarly community of econometricians. These essays consider applied research and methodologies in context and connect the history of econometrics to contemporary developments in related disciplines and technologies. Analyzing the practice of econometrics around the world since its introduction in the 1920s, contributors examine the relationship between sociology and welfare in Italian econometrics, the extraordinary investment in macroeconometric models and input-output models in Japan, practices of econometrics in relation to computation and philosophy, and the recognition of unusual methodological stances in both theoretical and applied work. Reinterpreting the accepted history of econometrics allows historians to focus on new alliances, methods, and entrepreneurial models that resolve past obscurities and open up new areas for future inquiry.

Contributors: John Aldrich, Jeff E. Biddle, Olav Bjerkholt, Marcel Boumans, Chao-Hsi Huang, Robert W. Dimand, Duo Qin, Ariane Dupont-Kieffer, Hsiang-Ke Chao, Aiko Ikeo, Francisco Louçã, Mary S. Morgan, Daniela Parisi, Alain Pirotte, Charles G. Renfro, Thomas Stapleford, Sofia Terlica

Marcel Boumans is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. Ariane Dupont-Kieffer is a Researcher at the French National Institute of Research on Transport and Safety. Duo Qin is Reader of Economics at the University of London.

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cover of Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures

Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures

Edited by Christopher D. Carroll, Thomas F. Crossley, and John Sabelhaus

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Robust and reliable measures of consumer expenditures are essential for analyzing aggregate economic activity and for measuring differences in household circumstances. Many countries, including the United States, are embarking on ambitious projects to redesign surveys of consumer expenditures, with the goal of better capturing economic heterogeneity. This is an appropriate time to examine the way consumer expenditures are currently measured, and the challenges and opportunities that alternative approaches might present.      

Improving the Measurement of Consumer Expenditures begins with a comprehensive review of current methodologies for collecting consumer expenditure data. Subsequent chapters highlight the range of different objectives that expenditure surveys may satisfy, compare the data available from consumer expenditure surveys with that available from other sources, and describe how the United States’s current survey practices compare with those in other nations.
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cover of Labour Statistics for a Market Economy: Challenges and Solutions in the Transition Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Labour Statistics for a Market Economy

Challenges and Solutions in the Transition Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union

Igor Chernyshev

Central European University Press, 1995

The International Labour Office is the moving force behind the adoption of the Labour Force Survey in Western countries as the only reliable means of gathering information about trends in employment and unemployment, and on pay. The countries of East-Central Europe and the former USSR have recognized their need of such statistiics and turned to the ILO to help them set up systems to provide data required by decision makers. This pioneering work shows how the old "command" economies are setting up brand new systems to classify occupations, to measure employment and unemployment, and to collect information on wages and labour costs, which will be useful to students of the area and essential for statisticians world-wide concerned with the challenge of instigating an entirely new statistical service.
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cover of Measuring Capital in the New Economy

Measuring Capital in the New Economy

Edited by Carol Corrado, John Haltiwanger, and Daniel Sichel

University of Chicago Press, 2005

As the accelerated technological advances of the past two decades continue to reshape the United States' economy, intangible assets and high-technology investments are taking larger roles. These developments have raised a number of concerns, such as: how do we measure intangible assets? Are we accurately appraising newer, high-technology capital? The answers to these questions have broad implications for the assessment of the economy's growth over the long term, for the pace of technological advancement in the economy, and for estimates of the nation's wealth.

In Measuring Capital in the New Economy, Carol Corrado, John Haltiwanger, Daniel Sichel, and a host of distinguished collaborators offer new approaches for measuring capital in an economy that is increasingly dominated by high-technology capital and intangible assets. As the contributors show, high-tech capital and intangible assets affect the economy in ways that are notoriously difficult to appraise. In this detailed and thorough analysis of the problem and its solutions, the contributors study the nature of these relationships and provide guidance as to what factors should be included in calculations of different types of capital for economists, policymakers, and the financial and accounting communities alike.
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cover of Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth

Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth

Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A collection of twenty-three studies that explore the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility.

Economic research is increasingly focused on inequality in the distribution of personal resources and outcomes. One aspect of inequality is mobility: are individuals locked into their respective places in this distribution? To what extent do circumstances change, either over the lifecycle or across generations? Research not only measures inequality and mobility, but also analyzes the historical, economic, and social determinants of these outcomes and the effect of public policies. This volume explores the latest developments in the analysis of income and wealth distribution and mobility. The collection of twenty-three studies is divided into five sections. The first examines observed patterns of income inequality and shifts in the distribution of earnings and in other factors that contribute to it. The next examines wealth inequality, including a substantial discussion of the difficulties of defining and measuring wealth. The third section presents new evidence on the intergenerational transmission of inequality and the mechanisms that underlie it. The next section considers the impact of various policy interventions that are directed at reducing inequality. The final section addresses the challenges of combining household-level data, potentially from multiple sources such as surveys and administrative records, and aggregate data to study inequality, and explores ways to make survey data more comparable with national income accounts data.  
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cover of Measuring Economic Sustainability and Progress

Measuring Economic Sustainability and Progress

Edited by Dale W. Jorgenson, J. Steven Landefeld, and Paul Schreyer

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Since the Great Depression, researchers and statisticians have recognized the need for more extensive methods for measuring economic growth and sustainability. The recent recession renewed commitments to closing long-standing gaps in economic measurement, including those related to sustainability and well-being.

The latest in the NBER’s influential Studies in Income and Wealth series, which has played a key role in the development of national account statistics in the United States and other nations, this volume explores collaborative solutions between academics, policy researchers, and official statisticians to some of today’s most important economic measurement challenges. Contributors to this volume extend past research on the integration and extension of national accounts to establish an even more comprehensive understanding of the distribution of economic growth and its impact on well-being, including health, human capital, and the environment. The research contributions assess, among other topics, specific conceptual and empirical proposals for extending national accounts.
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cover of Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges

Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses

Current Knowledge and Challenges

Edited by John Haltiwanger, Erik Hurst, Javier Miranda, and Antoinette Schoar

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Start-ups and other entrepreneurial ventures make a significant contribution to the US economy, particularly in the tech sector, where they comprise some of the largest and most influential companies. Yet for every high-profile, high-growth company like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, many more fail. This enormous heterogeneity poses conceptual and measurement challenges for economists concerned with understanding their precise impact on economic growth.
           
Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses brings together economists and data analysts to discuss the most recent research covering three broad themes. The first chapters isolate high- and low-performing entrepreneurial ventures and analyze their roles in creating jobs and driving innovation and productivity. The next chapters turn the focus on specific challenges entrepreneurs face and how they have varied over time, including over business cycles. The final chapters explore core measurement issues, with a focus on new data projects under development that may improve our understanding of this dynamic part of the economy.
 
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cover of Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs

Edited by Ana Aizcorbe, Colin Baker, Ernst R. Berndt, and David M. Cutler

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Health care costs represent a nearly 18% of U.S. gross domestic product and 20% of government spending. While there is detailed information on where these health care dollars are spent, there is much less evidence on how this spending affects health. 
           
The research in Measuring and Modeling Health Care Costs seeks to connect our knowledge of expenditures with what we are able to measure of results, probing questions of methodology, changes in the pharmaceutical industry, and the shifting landscape of physician practice. The research in this volume investigates, for example, obesity’s effect on health care spending, the effect of generic pharmaceutical releases on the market, and the disparity between disease-based and population-based spending measures. This vast and varied volume applies a range of economic tools to the analysis of health care and health outcomes.

Practical and descriptive, this new volume in the Studies in Income and Wealth series is full of insights relevant to health policy students and specialists alike.
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cover of NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2017: Volume 32

NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2017

Volume 32

Edited by Jonathan A. Parker and Martin Eichenbaum

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2018

Volume 32 of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual features six theoretical and empirical studies of important issues in contemporary macroeconomics, and a keynote address by former IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard. In one study, SeHyoun Ahn, Greg Kaplan, Benjamin Moll, Thomas Winberry, and Christian Wolf examine the dynamics of consumption expenditures in non-representative-agent macroeconomic models. In another, John Cochrane asks which macro models most naturally explain the post-financial-crisis macroeconomic environment, which is characterized by the co-existence of low and nonvolatile inflation rates, near-zero short-term interest rates, and an explosion in monetary aggregates. Manuel Adelino, Antoinette Schoar, and Felipe Severino examine the causes of the lending boom that precipitated the recent U.S. financial crisis and Great Recession. Steven Durlauf and Ananth Seshadri investigate whether increases in income inequality cause lower levels of economic mobility and opportunity. Charles Manski explores the formation of expectations, considering the efficacy of directly measuring beliefs through surveys as an alternative to making the assumption of rational expectations. In the final research paper, Efraim Benmelech and Nittai Bergman analyze the sharp declines in debt issuance and the evaporation of market liquidity that coincide with most financial crises. Blanchard’s keynote address discusses which distortions are central to understanding short-run macroeconomic fluctuations.
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cover of New Developments in Productivity Analysis

New Developments in Productivity Analysis

Edited by Charles R. Hulten, Edwin R. Dean, and Michael J. Harper

University of Chicago Press, 2001

The productivity slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s and the resumption of productivity growth in the 1990s have provoked controversy among policymakers and researchers. Economists have been forced to reexamine fundamental questions of measurement technique. Some researchers argue that econometric approaches to productivity measurement usefully address shortcomings of the dominant index number techniques while others maintain that current productivity statistics underreport damage to the environment. In this book, the contributors propose innovative approaches to these issues. The result is a state-of-the-art exposition of contemporary productivity analysis.

Charles R. Hulten is professor of economics at the University of Maryland. He has been a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and is chair of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Michael Harper is chief of the Division of Productivity Research at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Edwin R. Dean, formerly associate commissioner for Productivity and Technology at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is adjunct professor of economics at The George Washington University.
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cover of New Directions in Market Design

New Directions in Market Design

Edited by Irene Lo, Michael Ostrovsky, Parag A. Pathak

University of Chicago Press, 2026

A comprehensive survey of the evolution of market design over the past three decades.

In the mid-1990s, the first Federal Communications Commission spectrum auction and the redesign of the National Residency Matching Program collectively helped to jumpstart the field of market design. Since then, extensive research has improved auction design and broken new conceptual ground in addressing multi-agent matching problems. This volume summarizes key discoveries and advances in market design over the past three decades and explores contemporary challenges—from climate policy and electricity markets to AI-mediated exchanges and hospital resource allocation.

Contributors examine how to design efficient, incentive-compatible mechanisms that are robust to shifting conditions and increasing complexity. They consider a wide variety of applications that could benefit from the market design viewpoint, such as environmental markets, school choice, and organ exchange. Together, the chapters illustrate the important interactions between economic theory, computational tools, and institutional insight.

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cover of R&D and Productivity: The Econometric Evidence

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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cover of Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century

Race, Ethnicity, and Economic Statistics for the 21st Century

Edited by Randall Akee, Lawrence F. Katz, and Mark A. Loewenstein

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Categorizing race and ethnicity for twenty-first-century statistics and economics.

The increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the US population raises the question of whether the race and ethnicity categories and definitions used by federal statistical agencies to create demographic statistics on which government officials, business decision-makers, and private citizens rely fully reflect the changing population. Official definitions of existing race and ethnic groups do not always command wide agreement, and over time, some definitions that were once widely accepted may become less so based on political, legal, and social factors. Comparable measures of race and ethnicity over time are needed to accurately track historical changes in economic and social outcomes, as well as racial and ethnic segregation.

This volume explores the production of economic statistics that accurately depict the complex racial and ethnic diversity of the US population in the twenty-first century. The chapters examine the consequences for economic analyses of different measurement choices concerning race and ethnicity, assess the likely implications of the 2024 changes in federal race and ethnicity measurement standards, introduce new data sets with richer demographic information, and compare measures of race and ethnicity in administrative versus survey data. They also apply existing data in creative ways to develop alternative characterizations of the changing US workforce and to illuminate important policy questions related to criminal justice, immigration, labor market discrimination, the social safety net, health care, and child welfare.

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cover of Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice: Volume 1

Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice

Volume 1

Robert E. Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1981

Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Assumptions about how people form expectations for the future shape the properties of any dynamic economic model. To make economic decisions in an uncertain environment people must forecast such variables as future rates of inflation, tax rates, government subsidy schemes and regulations. The doctrine of rational expectations uses standard economic methods to explain how those expectations are formed.

This work collects the papers that have made significant contributions to formulating the idea of rational expectations. Most of the papers deal with the connections between observed economic behavior and the evaluation of alternative economic policies.

Robert E. Lucas, Jr., is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. Thomas J. Sargent is professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota.

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cover of Solutions Manual to Elements of Econometrics

Solutions Manual to Elements of Econometrics

Jan Kmenta

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The Solutions Manual to Elements of Econometrics, Second Edition provides chapter solutions to the exercises in the college textbook: Elements of Econometrics, Second Edition by Jan Kmenta.

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cover of The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse: An Integration of Econometric and Behavioral Economic Research

The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse

An Integration of Econometric and Behavioral Economic Research

Edited by Frank J. Chaloupka, Michael Grossman, Warren K. Bickel, and Henry Saffer

University of Chicago Press, 1999

Conventional wisdom once held that the demand for addictive substances like cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs was unlike that for any other economic good and, therefore, unresponsive to traditional market forces. Recently, however, researchers from two disparate fields, economics and behavioral psychology, have found that increases in the overall price of an addictive substance can significantly reduce both the number of users and the amounts those users consume. Changes in the "full price" of addictive substances—including monetary value, time outlay, effort to obtain, and potential penalties for illegal use—yield marked variations in behavioral outcomes and demand.

The Economic Analysis of Substance Use and Abuse brings these distinctive fields of study together and presents for the first time an integrated assessment of their data and results. Unique and innovative, this multidisciplinary volume will serve as an important resource in the current debates concerning alcohol and drug use and abuse and the impacts of legalizing illicit drugs.

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cover of The Economics of Information and Uncertainty

The Economics of Information and Uncertainty

Edited by John J. McCall

University of Chicago Press, 1982

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cover of The End of Cheap Labour?: Industrial Transformation and "Social Upgrading" in China

The End of Cheap Labour?

Industrial Transformation and "Social Upgrading" in China

Florian Butollo

Campus Verlag, 2014

The Chinese government and international observers argue that China’s economy must overcome its excessive dependence on exports if substantial growth in domestic consumption is to be achieved and sustained in the future. But this shift can only occur if China also lessens its reliance on cheap migrant labor and encourages investment in its own labor force.

In The End of Cheap Labour?, Florian Butollo investigates the recent transformation of the garment and LED lighting industries in the Pearl River Delta, China’s largest industrial hub. He reveals that industrial upgrading rarely supports improvements in working conditions and the basic employment pattern; and this failure of “social upgrading” threatens to undermine the desired rebalancing of the Chinese economy. Butollo demonstrates that the implementation of collective labor rights remains an important obstacle in the future of the Chinese growth model.
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cover of The Measure of Economies: Measuring Productivity in an Age of Technological Change

The Measure of Economies

Measuring Productivity in an Age of Technological Change

Edited by Marshall B. Reinsdorf and Louise Sheiner

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Innovative new approaches for improving GDP measurement to better gauge economic productivity.

Official measures of gross domestic product (GDP) indicate that productivity growth has declined in the United States over the last two decades. This has led to calls for policy changes from pro-business tax reform to stronger antitrust measures. But are our twentieth-century economic methods actually measuring our twenty-first-century productivity?

The Measure of Economies offers a synthesis of the state of knowledge in productivity measurement at a time when many question the accuracy and scope of GDP. With chapters authored by leading economic experts on topics such as the digital economy, health care, and the environment, it highlights the inadequacies of current practices and discusses cutting-edge alternatives.

Pragmatic and forward-facing, The Measure of Economies is an essential resource not only for social scientists, but also for policymakers and business leaders seeking to understand the complexities of economic growth in a time of rapidly evolving technology.

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