Edward C Prescott
Biographic Data
| ID | 1152780 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edward C Prescott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edward C |
| FAMILY NAME | Prescott |
| SIGNATURE | PRESCOTT E C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 696 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Depressing Effect of Agricultural Institutions on the Prewar Japanese Economy
Why didn't the Japanese miracle take place before World War II? The culprit we identify is a barrier that kept prewar agricultural employment constant. Using a standard neoclassical two-sector growth model, we show that the barrier-induced sectoral distortion and an ensuring lack of capital accumulation account well for the depressed output level. Without the barrier, Japan's prewar GNP per worker would have been at least about a half of that of …
Nobel Lecture: The Transformation of Macroeconomic Policy and Research
Malthus to Solow
Postwar U.S. Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation
A study documents some features of aggregate economic fluctuations sometimes referred to as business cycles. The investigation uses quarterly data from the postwar US economy. The fluctuations studied are those that are too rapid to be accounted for by slowly changing demographic and technological factors and changes in the stocks of capital that produce secular growth in output per capita. The study proposes a procedure for representing a times …
The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool
An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but constructing a model economy and computing the economic behavior of the model's people is. Such experiments are termed 'computational' because economic behavior of the model's people is computed. Thi…
Frontiers of Business Cycle Research
List of IllustrationsList of TablesPrefaceContributors1Economic Growth and Business Cycles12Recursive Methods for Computing Equilibria of Business Cycle Models393Computing Equilibria of Nonoptimal Economies654Models with Heterogeneous Agents985Business Cycles and Aggregate Labor Market Fluctuations1266Household Production in Real Business Cycle Theory1577Money and the Business Cycle1758Non-Walrasian Economies2179Dynamic General Equilibrium Models…
Barriers to Technology Adoption and Development
The authors propose a theory of economic development in which technology adoption and barriers to such adoptions are the focus. The size of these barriers differs across countries and time. The larger these barriers, the greater the investment a firm must make to adopt a more advanced technology. The model is calibrated to the U.S. balanced growth observations and the postwar Japanese development miracle. For this calibrated structure, the author…
The equity premium: A puzzle
Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations
The equilibrium growth model is modified and used to explain the cyclical variances of a set of economic time series, the covariances between real output and the other series, and the autocovariance of output. The model is fitted to quarterly data for the post-war U.S. economy. Crucial features of the model are the assumption that more than one time period is required for the construction of new productive capital, and the non-time-separable util…
Organization Capital
The manner in which information is accumulated in the firm offers an explanation for the firm's existence. Information is an asset to the firm, for it affects the production possibility set and is produced jointly with output. We call this asset of the firm its organization capital. The costs of adjusting the stock of organization capital induce the firm to constrain its growth rate, thus explaining certain facts about firm growth and size distri…
Equilibrium Search and Unemployment
Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans
Even if there is an agreed-upon, fixed social objective function and policymakers know the timing and magnitude of the effects of their actions, discretionary policy, namely, the selection of that decision which is best, given the current situation and a correct evaluation of the end-of-period position, does not result in the social objective function being maximized. The reason for this apparent paradox is that economic planning is not a game ag…
Efficiency of the Natural Rate
Tests of an Adaptive Regression Model
A NY econometric equation representing a complex behavioral or technical relationship is, of necessity, an approximation of reality. As such, it is subject to errors in specification and structural change over time. This problem is well recognized by econometricians. Duesenberry and Klein (1965) point out that *'. . . as technology, institutional arrangements, tastes and managerial techniques change over time, the relationships represented by our…
Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans
Even if there is an agreed-upon, fixed social objective function and policymakers know the timing and magnitude of the effects of their actions, discretionary policy, namely, the selection of that decision which is best, given the current situation and a correct evaluation of the end-of-period position, does not result in the social objective function being maximized. The reason for this apparent paradox is that economic planning is not a game ag…
Barriers to Technology Adoption and Development
The authors propose a theory of economic development in which technology adoption and barriers to such adoptions are the focus. The size of these barriers differs across countries and time. The larger these barriers, the greater the investment a firm must make to adopt a more advanced technology. The model is calibrated to the U.S. balanced growth observations and the postwar Japanese development miracle. For this calibrated structure, the author…
Organization Capital
The manner in which information is accumulated in the firm offers an explanation for the firm's existence. Information is an asset to the firm, for it affects the production possibility set and is produced jointly with output. We call this asset of the firm its organization capital. The costs of adjusting the stock of organization capital induce the firm to constrain its growth rate, thus explaining certain facts about firm growth and size distri…
The Depressing Effect of Agricultural Institutions on the Prewar Japanese Economy
Why didn't the Japanese miracle take place before World War II? The culprit we identify is a barrier that kept prewar agricultural employment constant. Using a standard neoclassical two-sector growth model, we show that the barrier-induced sectoral distortion and an ensuring lack of capital accumulation account well for the depressed output level. Without the barrier, Japan's prewar GNP per worker would have been at least about a half of that of …
The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool
An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but constructing a model economy and computing the economic behavior of the model's people is. Such experiments are termed 'computational' because economic behavior of the model's people is computed. Thi…
Efficiency of the Natural Rate
Nobel Lecture: The Transformation of Macroeconomic Policy and Research
Tests of an Adaptive Regression Model
A NY econometric equation representing a complex behavioral or technical relationship is, of necessity, an approximation of reality. As such, it is subject to errors in specification and structural change over time. This problem is well recognized by econometricians. Duesenberry and Klein (1965) point out that *'. . . as technology, institutional arrangements, tastes and managerial techniques change over time, the relationships represented by our…
Efficiency of the Natural Rate
Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans
Even if there is an agreed-upon, fixed social objective function and policymakers know the timing and magnitude of the effects of their actions, discretionary policy, namely, the selection of that decision which is best, given the current situation and a correct evaluation of the end-of-period position, does not result in the social objective function being maximized. The reason for this apparent paradox is that economic planning is not a game ag…
Equilibrium Search and Unemployment
Organization Capital
The manner in which information is accumulated in the firm offers an explanation for the firm's existence. Information is an asset to the firm, for it affects the production possibility set and is produced jointly with output. We call this asset of the firm its organization capital. The costs of adjusting the stock of organization capital induce the firm to constrain its growth rate, thus explaining certain facts about firm growth and size distri…
Time to Build and Aggregate Fluctuations
The equilibrium growth model is modified and used to explain the cyclical variances of a set of economic time series, the covariances between real output and the other series, and the autocovariance of output. The model is fitted to quarterly data for the post-war U.S. economy. Crucial features of the model are the assumption that more than one time period is required for the construction of new productive capital, and the non-time-separable util…
The equity premium: A puzzle
Barriers to Technology Adoption and Development
The authors propose a theory of economic development in which technology adoption and barriers to such adoptions are the focus. The size of these barriers differs across countries and time. The larger these barriers, the greater the investment a firm must make to adopt a more advanced technology. The model is calibrated to the U.S. balanced growth observations and the postwar Japanese development miracle. For this calibrated structure, the author…
Frontiers of Business Cycle Research
List of IllustrationsList of TablesPrefaceContributors1Economic Growth and Business Cycles12Recursive Methods for Computing Equilibria of Business Cycle Models393Computing Equilibria of Nonoptimal Economies654Models with Heterogeneous Agents985Business Cycles and Aggregate Labor Market Fluctuations1266Household Production in Real Business Cycle Theory1577Money and the Business Cycle1758Non-Walrasian Economies2179Dynamic General Equilibrium Models…
The Computational Experiment: An Econometric Tool
An economic experiment places people in an environment desired by the experimenter, who then records the time paths of their economic behavior. Performing experiments using actual people at the level of national economies is obviously impractical but constructing a model economy and computing the economic behavior of the model's people is. Such experiments are termed 'computational' because economic behavior of the model's people is computed. Thi…
Postwar U.S. Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation
A study documents some features of aggregate economic fluctuations sometimes referred to as business cycles. The investigation uses quarterly data from the postwar US economy. The fluctuations studied are those that are too rapid to be accounted for by slowly changing demographic and technological factors and changes in the stocks of capital that produce secular growth in output per capita. The study proposes a procedure for representing a times …
Malthus to Solow
Nobel Lecture: The Transformation of Macroeconomic Policy and Research
The Depressing Effect of Agricultural Institutions on the Prewar Japanese Economy
Why didn't the Japanese miracle take place before World War II? The culprit we identify is a barrier that kept prewar agricultural employment constant. Using a standard neoclassical two-sector growth model, we show that the barrier-induced sectoral distortion and an ensuring lack of capital accumulation account well for the depressed output level. Without the barrier, Japan's prewar GNP per worker would have been at least about a half of that of …
Economics (13 works) · Monetary Policy and Economic Impact (9 works) · Economic theories and models (7 works) · Econometrics (6 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (5 works) · Mathematics (5 works) · Microeconomics (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Macroeconomics (4 works) · Mathematical economics (4 works)