Business Economics articles from July 1997

Business Economics archives from July 1997

Homeownership in the United States: where we've been; where we're going.
July 1, 1997... Homeownership has long been synonymous with the "American Dream," and it remains one of the cornerstones of federal housing policy. Indeed, many of the benefits accorded to owner-occupied housing in the federal tax code are there in an attempt to...

Trends and cycles in housing production.
July 1, 1997... Housing is a key element of the national economy and of every local community in the United States. Housing production, as measured by residential fixed investment (RFI) in the national income and product accounts, recently has made up about...

Technology and the housing markets.
July 1, 1997... Real estate is at its core an information business and nothing has been affected more by technology than the assembly, analysis and transfer of information. Technology has acted to remove barriers and tear down walls, creating a system in which...

Housing finance: a long-term perspective.
July 1, 1997... The 1990s have provided a favorable backdrop for the housing finance business. With an environment of steady economic growth and historically low mortgage rates, households exhibited a healthy appetite for home buying throughout this period,...

Industry corner: the outlook for manufactured housing in the United States.
July 1, 1997... Manufactured housing remains the most affordable type of housing in the United States. Most manufactured homes are permanently affixed to their foundations and utilized as primary residences. Thus, the once widely used term "mobile home" is a...

Notes on a borderless world. (global economic integration)(Transcript)
July 1, 1997... I want to thank OECD's Directorate for Science, Technology, and Industry for their invitation to make this plenary address this morning. This week's discussions about the global Information Age speak directly to the most important issue that our...

Changes in wages and worker attributes by firm size, 1983-1993.
July 1, 1997... Since the late 1980s, large businesses have become popularly associated with layoffs of veteran employees, much as small firms have been traditionally associated with the creation of jobs, albeit lower paying jobs with few or no fringe benefits....

Improving the CPI: the record and suggested next steps. (Consumer Price Index)
July 1, 1997... I especially appreciate being invited to comment on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for Business Economics because it has been almost twenty-five years since I initially laid out an agenda for its improvement in this journal.(1) That agenda was...

Beyond the CPI: an augmented cost of living index (ACOLI). (consumer price index)
July 1, 1997... The United States is currently undertaking a searching inquiry into the measurement of "the cost of living." Ideally, the cost of living would compare the minimum expenditure necessary to maintain the representative consumer at the same level of...

Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 1997 revision.
July 1, 1997... Earlier this year, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System completed a revision of its measures of output, capacity and capacity utilization for the industrial sector. The primary feature of the revision was the introduction of a new...

The statistics corner: update on the BLS sample redesign for the current employment statistics survey. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
July 1, 1997... In June 1995, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced plans for a comprehensive sample redesign of its monthly payroll survey. The Bureau's plans called for a two-year research effort to develop the new sample design, followed by a...

The statistics producers' corner.
July 1, 1997... IMPROVING MERCHANDISE TRADE DATA The Census Bureau, which is responsible for compiling and publishing U.S. merchandise trade data from Shipper's Export Declarations filed with the U. S. Customs Service, estimates that data collection and...

The business economist at work: KPMG Peat Marwick LLP.
July 1, 1997... Many of the articles that have appeared in this space have been written by corporate economists, who have redefined the role of the economist in their organizations so that the economist acts in the role of internal consultant to many different...

The PC corner. (personal computers) (Column)
July 1, 1997... Last quarter's column generated quite a bit of e-mail activity in response to my experiences with and recommendations concerning Windows 95. I also got some suggestions on how to solve my "Problem of the Quarter," a problem I was having with...

Taxing Ourselves: A Citizen's Guide to the Great Debate Over Tax Reform.
July 1, 1997... In the foreword to their book on tax reform, Joel Slemrod and Jon Bakija imply that general relativity wasn't much of an intellectual challenge for Albert Einstein. Rather, what Einstein really had difficulty with was the income tax. He termed it...