Murray F. Foss – författare

The main topics treated in this conference volume are problems of deflation and quality change, the adequacy of the data used to construct the U.S. national accounts, and the broad theoretical evolution of the U.S. national income and product accounts. As these topics suggest, this volume represents a new stage in the study of national income and product accounts in that emphasis is placed on the information content of the system rather than on the structure of the accounts. This new emphasis is highlighted by the inclusion of a discussion among prominent users of the national accounts—Lawrence Klein, Otto Eckstein, Alan Greenspan, and Arthur Okun—that indicates the difficulties that confront those who utilize this information.

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.

This volume brings together and expands on a body of research that I began in the early 1960s and have continued up to the present. It deals mainly with shiftwork-work that is performed during other than normal daytime hours. Shiftwork is a characteristic of economic life in the United States and abroad that has increased in importance over the years; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one out of five full-time and part-time employees in the United States works on shifts. My interest in this field concerns fixed capital, specifically, changes in weekly hours worked by capital over long periods of time, and the signifi­ cance of those changes in the measurement oflong-run productivity change. In studies of growth, the measurement of capital input-by capital stocks or the services yielded by those stocks-typically makes no allowance for the changing hours worked by capital. Capital services are assumed to be propor­ tional to the stocks. Consequently, in analyses of output growth in a growth­ accounting framework, the effect of longer capital hours is a component of multifactor or total factor productivity growth.

This volume brings together and expands on a body of research that I began in the early 1960s and have continued up to the present. It deals mainly with shiftwork-work that is performed during other than normal daytime hours. Shiftwork is a characteristic of economic life in the United States and abroad that has increased in importance over the years; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, one out of five full-time and part-time employees in the United States works on shifts. My interest in this field concerns fixed capital, specifically, changes in weekly hours worked by capital over long periods of time, and the signifi­ cance of those changes in the measurement oflong-run productivity change. In studies of growth, the measurement of capital input-by capital stocks or the services yielded by those stocks-typically makes no allowance for the changing hours worked by capital. Capital services are assumed to be propor­ tional to the stocks. Consequently, in analyses of output growth in a growth­ accounting framework, the effect of longer capital hours is a component of multifactor or total factor productivity growth.