Inflation/Unemployment Regimes and the Instability of the Phillips Curve

From a theoretical standpoint, Friedman (1968) argued that in the long‐run there is no connection between inflation and the state of demand. In so far as there is consensus on these matters amongst economists, this is it. However, the ‘long run ’ is a theoretical concept, and economic theory offers no guidance as to how long the long run might be in practice (though see Atkinson (1969) for

What’s Spurious, What’s Real? Measuring the Productivity Impacts of ICT at the Firm-Level

In order to assess the productivity effects of information and communication technologies (ICT), regressions based on cross–sectional firm–level data may yield unreliable results for the commonly employed production function framework. In this paper, various estimation biases and econometric strategies to overcome their sources are discussed. The effects are illustrated on the basis of a representative set of panel data for German service firms. The application of a suited SYS–GMM estimator yields evidence for significant productivity effects of ICT which are substantially smaller though than those suggested by cross–section or pooled OLS estimates

Assessing the Effect of High Performance Computing Capabilities on Academic Research Output

This paper uses nonparametric methods and some new results on hypothesis testing with nonparametric efficiency estimators and applies these to analyze the effect of locally-available high performance computing (HPC) resources on universities efficiency in producing research and other outputs. We find that locally-available HPC resources enhance the technical efficiency of research output in Chemistry, Civil Engineering, Physics, and History, but not in Computer Science, Economics, nor English; we find mixed results for Biology. Out research results provide a critical first step in a quantitative economic model for investments in HPC