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Journal Article
On the economic analysis of smoking bans
Journal Article
Currency boards: monetary magic?
Journal Article
Considering the capital account
Journal Article
The high-tech investment boom and economic growth in the 1990s: accounting for quality
The rapid pace of economic growth in the 1990s was associated with an increasingly prominent role for investment, particularly for information processing and communications technologies. Given the evident pace of technological advancement in these sectors, official economic statistics have been constructed to take careful account of improvements in the quality of these high-tech capital goods. In this article, Michael R. Pakko examines the possibility that this selective accounting for quality improvement has distorted the true importance of high-tech investment in recent economic growth ...
Journal Article
The FOMC in 1993 and 1994: monetary policy in transition
Journal Article
The economics of smoking bans: peering through the haze
Although such prohibitions are becoming more common, generalizations can't be made about their impact because they still are too new and too few. Scrutiny of the ban in Maryville, Mo., shows that the issues remain hazy.
Journal Article
Shoe-leather costs of inflation and policy credibility
Inflation can cause costly misallocations of resources as consumers seek to protect the purchasing power of their nominal assets. In this article, Michael R. Pakko discusses the nature of these distortions - known as "shoe-leather" costs - in a model where the demand for money is motivated by a "shopping-time" constraint. While the estimates of the shoe-leather costs of long-run inflation (implied by this model) are generally consistent with previous studies, the article goes on to show that the transition between inflation rates can involve dynamics that alter the nature of these ...
Journal Article
Accounting for computers
Journal Article
The business cycle and chain-weighted GDP: has our perspective changed?
Our perspective on the U.S. economy's recent performance has been challenged recently by changes in the methodology used to adjust the National Income and Product Accounts for inflation. Michael R. Pakko surveys the changes embodied in the revised data, examining the question of whether or not the revisions alter our view of the overall pattern of economic fluctuations known collectively as the business cycle.