TY  - JOUR
AU  - Nordhaus,William
TI  - Retrospective on the 1970s Productivity Slowdown
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10950
PY  - 2004
Y2  - December 2004
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10950
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10950.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
William D. Nordhaus
Yale University, Department of Economics
28 Hillhouse Avenue
Box 208264
New Haven, CT  06520-8264
Tel: 203/432-3598
Fax: 203/432-5779
E-Mail: william.nordhaus@yale.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2005-06-01
AB  - The present study analyzes the "productivity slowdown" of the 1970s. The study also develops a new data set -- industrial data available back to 1948 -- as well as a new set of tools for decomposing changes in productivity growth. The major result of this study is that the productivity slowdown of the 1970s has survived three decades of scrutiny, conceptual refinements, and data revisions. The slowdown was primarily centered in those sectors that were most energy-intensive, were hardest hit by the energy shocks of the 1970s, and therefore had large output declines. In a sense, the energy shocks were the earthquake, and the industries with the largest slowdown were near the epicenter of the tectonic shifts in the economy.
ER  -