What will homeland security cost?

The increased spending on security by the public and private sectors in response to September 11 could have important effects on the U.S. economy. Sizable government expenditures, for example, could trigger a rise in the cost of capital and wages and a reduction in investment and employment in the private sector, while large-scale spending by businesses could hamper firm productivity. This article attempts to quantify the likely effects of homeland security expenditures on the economy. It suggests that the total amount of public- and private-sector spending will be relatively small: the annual direct costs of the homeland security efforts are estimated to be $72 billion, or 0.66 percent of GDP in 2003. In the private sector, homeland security expenses are estimated to lower labor productivity levels by at most 1.12 percent. Therefore, the reallocation of resources associated with homeland security is unlikely to have any large and long-lasting effects on the U.S. economy.Economic conditions - United States ; Terrorism ; War - Economic aspects

Commodity price movements and PCE inflation

With the recent run-up in crop and energy prices - and the subsequent sharp reversal of these trends - the effects of commodity price movements on U.S. inflation merit renewed attention. A study of the contributions of grain and oil prices to the PCE index of inflation suggests that the effects are more modest than one might expect. Moreover, commodity price increases affect relatively few goods prices: Higher crop prices translate narrowly into price hikes for food, tobacco, and gardening supplies; rising oil prices mainly influence fuel, energy, and transportation prices.

Lobbies and Technology Diffusion

This paper explores whether lobbies slow down technology diffusion. To answer this question, we exploit the differential effect of various institutional attributes that should affect the costs of erecting barriers when the new technology has a technologically close predecessor but not otherwise. We implement this test in a unique dataset compiled by us that covers the diffusion of 20 technologies for 23 countries over the past two centuries. We find that each of the relevant institutional variables that affect the costs of erecting barriers has a significantly larger effect on the diffusion of technologies with a competing predecessor technology than when no such a technology exists. These effects are quantitatively important. Thus, we conclude that lobbies are an important barrier to technology adoption and to development.

Adoption Lags, Implementation Gaps, and Economic Growth

We introduce a model of endogenous growth in which the returns to innovation are determined by the technology adoption decisions of the users of the new innovative technologies. The technology adoption decisions in our model consist of two dimensions. The first is when to adopt a new technology. The second is at what initial productivity level to adopt it and which part of its productivity potential to learn by doing. Our model economy is one with realistic adoption curves for each technology, the shape of which are an important determinant of the return to innovations and thus of economic growthendogenous growth, learning by doing, technology adoption

Spurious Investment Specific Technological Change

imperfect competition, price indices, vintage capital.

Technology diffusion and postwar growth

In the aftermath of WorldWar II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies. This acceleration is correlated with the incidence of U.S. economic aid and technical assistance in the same period. We interpret this as supportive of the interpretation that technology transfers from the U.S. to Western European countries and Japan were an important factor in driving growth in these recipient countries during the postwar decades.Technology - Economic aspects

Social security and the consumer price index for the elderly

Some argue that social security benefits should be adjusted using a price index that reflects the spending habits of the elderly rather than those of workers. This study suggests that if such an index were adopted today, over the next forty years benefit levels would increase and the social security trust fund could become insolvent up to five years sooner than projected.Social security ; Old age ; Consumer price indexes

Lobbying and Technology Diffusion

Technology Diffusion, Lobbies, Institutions

Do alternative measures of GDP affect its interpretation?

Gross domestic product's high correlation with unemployment and inflation makes it a key measure of the U.S. economy. Yet the somewhat arbitrary nature of the GDP construction process complicates interpretation and measurement of the indicator. A study of an alternative measure of GDP designed to address the published series' limitations finds that the adjusted measure differs in its representation of the long-term trend--but not the short-term fluctuations--of GDP. The published series' relevance as an indicator is therefore robust to some of the arbitrariness of its construction.Gross domestic product ; Economic indicators ; Econometrics

Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts.

We examine the diffusion of more than twenty technologies across twenty-three of the world ’s leading industrial economies. Our evidence covers major technology classes such as textile production, steel manufacture, communications, information technology, transportation, and electricity for the period 1788-2001. We document the common patterns observed in the diffusion of this broad range of technologies. Our results suggest a pattern of trickle-down diffusion that is remarkably robust across technologies. Most of the technologies that we consider originate in advanced economies and are adopted there first. Subsequently, they trickle down to countries that lag economically. Our panel data analysis indicates that the most important determinants of the speed at which a country adopts technologies are the country’s human capital endowment, type of government, degree of openness to trade, and adoption of predecessor technologies. We also find that the overall rate of diffusion has increased markedly since World War II because of the convergence in these variables across countries.ECONOMIC GROWTH; HISTORICAL DATA; TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION.