DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

The benefits of the ‘ICT revolution’ are readily seen in labour productivity statistics for the US, but a similar acceleration of productivity growth was not seen in Western Europe. This column argues that most of the 1995-2005 US productivity growth revival was driven by ICT-intensive industries producing market services and computer hardware. In contrast, the EU10 experienced a 1995-2005 growth slowdown due to a paucity of ICT investment, a failure to capture the efficiency benefits of ICT, and performance shortfalls in specific industries. After 2005 both the US and the EU10 suffered a growth slowdown, indicating that the benefits of the ICT revolution were temporary rather than providing a new permanent era of faster productivity growth.

U.S. inflation used to rise during economic booms, as businesses charged higher prices to cope with increases in wages and other costs. When the economy cooled and joblessness rose, inflation declined. This pattern changed around 1990. Since then, U.S. inflation has been remarkably stable, even though economic activity and unemployment have continued to fluctuate. For example, during the Great Recession unemployment reached 10 percent, but inflation barely dipped below 1 percent. More recently, even with unemployment as low as 3.5 percent, inflation remained stuck under 2 percent. What explains the emergence of this disconnect between inflation and unemployment? This is the question we address in “What’s Up with the Phillips Curve?,” published recently in Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.

The decisions of judges, lenders, journal editors, and other gatekeepers often lead to disparities in outcomes across affected groups. An important question is whether, and to what extent, these group-level disparities are driven by relevant differences in underlying individual characteristics, or by biased decision makers. Becker (1957) proposed an outcome test for bias leading to a large body of related empirical work, with recent innovations in settings where decision makers are exogenously assigned to cases and vary progressively in their decision tendencies. We carefully examine what can be learned about bias in decision making in such settings. Our results call into question recent conclusions about racial bias among bail judges, and, more broadly, yield four lessons for researchers considering the use of outcome tests of bias.

The emergence of the discipline of economics in the 18th century was the result of people trying to explain something that had never happened before. At the time a handful of countries were becoming fabulously rich, while others remained dirt-poor. In 1500 the world’s richest country was twice as well-off as the poorest one; by 1750 the ratio was five to one. It is no coincidence that the most famous book in economics, published in 1776, inquired into “the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”.

Why is modern society capable of cumulative innovation? In A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Joel Mokyr persuasively argues that sustained technological progress stemmed from a change in cultural beliefs. The change occurred gradually during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was fostered by an intellectual elite that formed a transnational community and adopted new attitudes toward the creation and diffusion of knowledge, setting the foundation for the ethos of modern science. The book is a significant contribution to the growing literature that links culture and economics. This review discusses Mokyr’s historical analysis in relation to the following questions: What is culture and how should we use it in economics? How can culture explain modern economic growth? Will the culture of growth that caused modern prosperity persist in the future?

Each year, the Associated Student Government (ASG) collected nominations for the Faculty and Administrator Honor Roll from the student body during the spring ASG election. Nearly 200 students participated in 2019-20, writing thorough and complex portraits for their small, medium, and large class professors and administrators and staff members who make Northwestern the institution that it is. ASG wishes to honor the work of the faculty and administrators whose dedication and care for students led to their inclusion on this list. Here is your 2019-2020 Faculty and Administrator Honor Roll.

Jennifer Haynes didn’t just fall through cracks in the country’s social safety net. In her case, it’s been more like a chasm. Haynes, 42, a self-employed chef and single mother living in Rancho Cucamonga, California, had been getting $167 a week in unemployment benefits and an extra $600 a week from the federal government. The aid was enough to catch up on a few months of bills and feed her 11-year-old twin boys.

Coronavirus put the issue center stage – and both Republicans and Democrats are touting plans to solve the problem.

Standard measures of productivity display enormous dispersion across farms in Africa. Crop yields and input intensities appear to vary greatly, seemingly in conflict with a model of efficient allocation across farms. In this paper, we present a theoretical framework for distinguishing between measurement error, unobserved heterogeneity, and potential misallocation. Using rich panel data from farms in Tanzania and Uganda, we estimate our model using a flexible specification in which we allow for several kinds of measurement error and heterogeneity. We find that measurement error and heterogeneity together account for a large fraction of the dispersion in measured productivity.