Is the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis dead? Shocks and aggregate fluctuations revisited

This paper re-examines recent empirical evidence that positive technology shocks lead to short-run declines in hours. Building on Galí's [1999. Technology, employment, and the business cycle: do technology shocks explain aggregate fluctuations. American Economic Review 89, 249-271] work, which uses long-run restrictions to identify technology shocks, we analyze whether the identified shocks can be plausibly interpreted as technology shocks. We first examine the validity of the identification assumption in a DGE model with several possible sources of permanent shocks. We then empirically assess the plausibility of the shocks using a variety of tests. After finding that the shocks pass all of the tests, we present two examples of modified DGE models that match the facts.     

Assessing the effectiveness of a Marine Environmental Protection Program

The Marine Environmental Protection (MEP) Program of the United States Coast Guard has a responsibility for improving the quality of our oceans and waterways. This paper describes the analytical construct developed for measuring the effectiveness of the program's activities. It discusses how the overall objective was translated into subobjectives, called program elements. Measures of the resources utilized by the program, the activities performed, and the results of those activities are presented. The applicability of regression analysis in relating the resources utilized to performance measures on the program elements is discussed and evaluated in the light of the multi-mission nature of Coast Guard activities.     

Multinational corporations and economic nationalism: Conflict over resource development in Canada

Faced with rising Third World nationalism, multinational corporations engaged in resource exploitation are turning back to higher cost but apparently politically more secure investments in the industrialized states. To what extent does the dynamic of government– resource industry relations in an industrialized setting differ from the pattern observed in the Third World? To answer this question the article analyses the decision to nationalize the potash industry in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan using models of host government–MNC conflict developed by Vernon, Mikesell and Moran to study Third World cases. The research suggests that the dynamic logic of government-industry conflict in a developed country setting is very similar to the pattern observed in the Third World. The decentralized Canadian federation, the ideology of the party in power in Saskatchewan and the nature of the potash industry combine to structure a situation in which coercive nationalization of a resource industry was seen as the only policy option.     

The return of Malthus?: The global demographic future,2000–2050

The Western world, with its demographic explosion completed and increasing living standards, should not forget the warnings of Malthus. By 2001, at expected growth rates, the world is on track for 8000 million population by 2023, increasing the chance of global conflict, hardship and disorganization. A key issue for the developing world is that of government control v individual choice and whether, following the example of the socialist societies, feelings of national and community interest will be encouraged in attempts to reduce fertility levels.     

Workplace Transformation and Worker Upskilling: The Perspective of Individual Workers

How common is workplace transformation in the American economy? What are its implications for work force skill requirements and training investments? The existing literature addressing these questions is based on firm-reported survey data. Using new data available in the 1993 wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this article examines the same questions from the perspective of individual workers. Our empirical results suggest that workplace transformation is commonplace. Fully 40 percent of private-sector workers surveyed report that in the space of just one year, a change occurred at work that required them to learn new job skills. About 23 percent of all respondents reported experiencing a workplace change we term anorganizational transformation. Incidence of formal training is positively related to indicators of organizational transformation, but the effect of these indicators is found to be sensitive to the inclusion of other important workplace change variables (namely, new products, new equipment, and new government regulations). While we expected to find strong positive relationships with product development and physical capital investment, government regulation has a surprisingly large impact on formal training.     

Economic growth and the development of telecommunications infrastructure in the G-20 countries: A panel-VAR approach

This paper examines the linkages between the development of telecommunications infrastructure (DTI), economic growth, and four key indicators of operation of a modern economy: gross capital formation, foreign direct investment inflows, urbanization rates, and trade openness. By studying the G-20 countries over the period 1991–2012 and employing a panel vector auto-regressive model for detecting Granger causality, we find a network of long-run causal connections between these variables, including bidirectional causality between DTI and economic growth.     

Wealth Accounting,Exhaustible Resources and Social Welfare

The empirical literature on natural resource accounting uses methods which implicitly or explicitly entail measuring changes in total resource asset value when an exhaustible resource is depleted. In contrast, the growth theoretic literature on saving, social welfare and sustainable development is built upon a central finding, that the change in real wealth (as measured by net or ‘genuine’ saving) is proportional to the change in social welfare. We show that the change in total wealth exceeds the change in real wealth in optimal and non-optimal models of resource-extracting economies. This suggests that the change in social welfare is over-estimated when the change in total resource asset value is used as the measure of depletion. A simple empirical exercise, using World Bank data on ‘adjusted net saving’, reinforces the results from theory.