Measurement of Productivity

Semester 2

The goal of the course is to acquaint students with a variety of useful tools used in applied economics and econometrics. The main topics to be covered are:
• How to aggregate price and quantity series into aggregates
• Problems with national accounting data
• The measurement of productivity
• The measurement of capital and income
• Estimation of elasticities of demand and supply using flexible functional forms
• The construction of small macro models based on microeconomic theory
• Benchmarking and the nonparametric approach to efficiency analysis

Each student will pick an OECD country (or an Asian country covered by the Asian Productivity Organization), collect data for it, estimate systems of supply and demand equations for it, compute its productivity performance over the 52 years 1960-2011 (for the more recent OECD countries, the data will start later) and present a 15 to 20 minute talk to the class on his or her country’s performance. By listening to the other student’s presentations, one can obtain a very good idea of how the various OECD countries grew over the past 50 or so years. Lecture notes and computer programs will be distributed.
However, the computer programs will require a considerable amount of editing on the part of the student. Problem sets will be assigned after each class for the first 5 weeks of the course and they will be due at the start of the following class. Please note: if you do not hand in the work on time, you will get no credit for the homework. Hence if you plan to miss classes, you should make some arrangement to get the homework handed in.
Note also that each student must work independently; joint work is not allowed.

Homework 50%
Classroom presentation 10%
Final paper 40%

Lecture Note:

Target

Inequalities

Convex Sets and Concave Function

Microeconomic Theory: A Dual Approach

Notes on the Construction of a Data Set for an O.E.C.D. Country

Index Number Theory: Part I: An Overview

Index Number Theory: Part II: The Economic Approach to Index Number Theory

The Measurement of Productivity

The Measurement of Capital

The Measurement of Income and the Determinants of Income Growth

Flexible Functional Forms

Linear Programming

Benchmarking and the Nonparametric Approach to Production Theory

A Conceptual Framework for Commercial Property Price Indexes

Presentation and Discussion

Presentation and Discussion



Presentation and Discussion

Presentation and Discussion