At the origins of increased productivity growth in services. Productivity, social savings and the consumer surplus of the film industry, 1900-1938

The basic issue concerning production in welfare economics is whether a market solution will yield the socially optimum kinds and quantities of commodities. It is well known that problems can arise for three broad reasons: distributive justice; external effects; and scale economies. This paper

Seminar at Vanderbilt University for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the authors. Social Saving of the Panama Canal At the time when the Panama Canal was handed over to Panama, most people believed that the Canal was of little

There is a worldwide trend toward defined contribution saving plans and growing interest in privatized Social Security plans. In both environments, individuals are given some responsibility to make their own asset-allocation decisions, raising concerns about how well they do at this task

and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime. Given the consistency of our estimates, we calculate the social savings from crime reduction associated

This paper examines entrepreneurship in order to analyze, first, the degree to which the opportunity to start or own a business affects the household’s saving behavior and the implication of this behavior for the distribution of wealth and, second, the relationship between the extent

for the design of 401(k) savings plans as well as for any type of Social Security reform that includes personal accounts over which individuals have control. They also shed light more generally on the importance of both economic and noneconomic (behavioral) factors in the determination of individual savings

. But they have tended to do so in forms so rigid and general that their models cannot grip the essential phenomena of growth, as they appear to an economic historian. We require a dynamic theory of production which isolates not only the distribution of income between consumption, saving, and investment (and

“Large-Scale Technological Change”, and is directed by Professor

further details about this project and additional copies of this, and