Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment
The Collected Essays of Robert J. Gordon

This book offers sharply etched views on the principal topics of macroeconomics.

Robert J. Gordon (Author), Robert M. Solow (Foreword by)

9780521800082, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 December 2003

518 pages, 46 b/w illus. 77 tables
22.9 x 15.2 x 3.3 cm, 0.93 kg

The seventeen seminal essays by Robert J. Gordon collected here, including three previously unpublished works, offer sharply etched views on the principal topics of macroeconomics - growth, inflation, and unemployment. The author re-examines their salient points in a uniquely creative, accessible introduction that serves on its own as an introduction to modern macroeconomics. Each of the four parts into which the essays are grouped also offers a new introduction. The papers in Part I explore different key aspects of the history, theory, and measurement of productivity growth. The essays in Part II investigate the sources of business cycles and productivity fluctuations. Those in Part III cover the effects of supply shocks in macroeconomics. The final group presents empirical studies of the dynamics of inflation in the United States. The foreword by Nobel Laureate Robert M. Solow comments on the abiding importance of these essays drawn from 1968 to the present.

Part I. The History, Theory, and Measurement of Productivity Growth: Introduction
1. Does the new economy measure up to the great inventions of the past?
2. Interpreting the 'one big wave' in US long-term productivity growth
3. The disappearance of productivity change
4. The concept of capital
5. Is there a tradeoff between unemployment and productivity growth?
6. Forward into the past: productivity retrogression in the electric generating industry
Part II. Interpreting Productivity Fluctuations over the Business cycle: Introduction
7. Fresh water, salt water, and other macroeconomic elixirs
8. Are procylical productivity fluctuations a figment of measurement error?
9. The jobless recovery: does it signal a new era of productivity-led growth?
Part III. The Theory of Inflation-Unemployment Tradeoff: Introduction
10. Alternative responses of policy to external supply shocks
11. Supply shocks and monetary policy revisited
12. The theory of domestic inflation
13. The Phillips Curve now and then
Part IV. Empirical Studies of Inflation Dynamics in the United States: Introduction
14. Can the inflation of the 1970s be explained?
15. The output cost of disinflation in traditional and vector autoregressive models
16. German and American wage and price dynamics: differences and common themes
17. Foundations of the Goldilocks economy: supply shocks and the time-varying NAIRU.

Subject Areas: International business [KJK], Macroeconomics [KCB], Economic theory & philosophy [KCA]