Dale W. Jorgenson

The relentless decline in the prices of information technology (IT) has steadily enhanced the role of IT investment as a source of economic growth in the United States. Productivity growth in IT-producing industries has gradually risen in importance, and a productivity revival has taken place in the rest of the economy. In this book Dale Jorgenson shows that IT provides the foundation for the resurgence of American economic growth.

The objectives of econometric modeling of producer behavior are to determine the nature of substitution among inputs and outputs and of differences in technology, as well as the role of economies of scale in production. Recent advances in methodology, based on the dual formulation of the theory of production in terms of prices, have enabled econometricians to achieve these objectives more effectively. This volume summarizes the economic theory, the econometric methodology, and the empirical findings resulting from the new approach.

Volume 1: Econometric General Equilibrium Modeling presents an econometric approach to general equilibrium modeling of the impact of economic policies. Earlier approaches were based on the "calibration" of general equilibrium models to a single data point. The obvious disadvantage of calibration is that it requires highly restrictive assumptions about technology and preferences, such as fixed input-output coefficients. These assumptions are contradicted by the massive evidence of energy conservation in response to higher world energy prices, beginning in 1973.

This volume presents an approach to the evaluation of economic policies through the econometric modeling of aggregate consumer behavior. While the preferences of individual consumers are revealed by their market choices, these preferences can be recovered only by econometric methods, not through the index numbers used in the official statistics.