Otto Eckstein

The Determination of Money Wages in American Industry

Issues in wage determination, 379. — Hypothesis 1 (institutional): wage rates are set by a bargaining process, 381. — Hypothesis 2 (economic): both product and labor market factors influence wage determination, 381. — Hypothesis 3 (economic): two variables, profit and unemployment rates, are sufficient to explain most of the variation in the rate of increase of wage rates, 383. — Hypothesis 4 (institutional): wage determination in a group of heavy industries is interdependent, 384. — Hypothesis 5 (institutional): wages are determined in wage rounds, 386. — The central result on wages: wage determination in the key group, 388. — Some supporting evidence: time series for individual industries within the key group, 390. — The significance of other variables — productivity, 392; consumer prices, 392. — Wage determination outside the key group, 394. — Results of cross-section analysis, 397. — Reconciliation of time series and cross-section results, 401. — Relation to previous empirical results, 402. — Is there a Phillips curve for the United States? 406. — Extrapolation of the central result, 406. — Summary and concluding comment, 408. — Appendix I. The derivation of the central result, 409. — Appendix II. The construction of unemployment estimates for two-digit industries, 413.

Short-Run Productivity Behavior in U.S. Manufacturing

IN recent years the behavior of productivity has received increasing theoretical and empirical attention. Two basic approaches have been developed. The first focuses upon the long-run trend in output per man-hour and examines the sources of that trend. The second focuses upon the short-run or cyclical behavior of productivity. The purpose of this paper is to explain the characteristic behavior of output per man-hour over the business cycle and to identify changes in the cyclical response mechanism. An explanation of cyclical changes in productivity is essential for an analysis of unit labor costs, and is therefore a necessary ingredient in an explanation of the price level and its movements. It is also a necessary precondition to understanding the longer-run trends; cyclical fluctuations in output per man-hour are large, and the trends based on capital and technology cannot be seen until the short-run variations have been removed.

National Economic Information Systems for Developed Economies

A National Economic Information System (NEIS) is defined as having five elements: (I) computer systems; (2) a communications network; (3) software; (4) databanks; and (5) econometric models. The characteristics of each element are discussed, and the contributions of such systems to the various types of centres of economic analysis are indicated. It is concluded that timesharing computer technology does have particular benefits for economic analysis.