Steven M. Fazzari

Household Income, Demand, and Saving: Deriving Macro Data with Micro Data Concepts

We develop adjustments to align the NIPA measures of key household flows with cash flow concepts that better reflect household budgets and demand. The adjustments significantly change important macroeconomic time series and give different perspective on household spending and saving. Furthermore, household income aggregated from micro data sets like the CPS, SCF, and PSID differs significantly from NIPA personal income. But the micro survey data likely reflect cash flow concepts rather than NIPA imputations. Indeed the adjusted cash flow measure of income eliminates most of the shortfall of CPS, SCF, and PSID of CPS income relative to NIPA household income.

Tobin's Q, non-constant returns to scale, and imperfectly competitive product markets

This study explores the impact of non-constant returns to scale and imperfectly competitive product markets on the empirical performance of the q-model of investment. We present an econometric specification linking the unobserved shadow price of capital to financial market data when returns-to-scale are not necessarily constant and product markets are not necessarily competitive. Furthermore, unlike most Q-studies, we work within a discrete-time framework, and give explicit attention to the relations between inventories, sales, and production. Our new specification allows us to recover parameters characterizing returns-to-scale, product market, and adjustment cost elasticities. Estimates are reported for 12 mature industries in the United States drawn from VALUELINE.