Marshall B. Reinsdorf is a former senior economist with the International Monetary Fund. Louise Sheiner is a senior fellow at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution.
""[These[ papers explore the productivity measurement debate, considering problems facing price measurement and recommendations to statistical agencies about improvements and research that could be implemented and pursued."" * Journal of Economic Literature * “Productivity growth is central to improvements in the well-being of a society. In recent years, there have been significant questions about the accuracy of our productivity measures. Sheiner, Reinsdorf, and their collaborators tackle those questions, laying out how the statistical agencies measure productivity, identifying where the problems with the measures lie and—importantly—suggesting possible steps towards improving them.” -- Katharine G. Abraham | University of Maryland “Measuring productivity does not catch the eye of headline writers, which is lamentable since productivity is a vital issue. Reinsdorf, Sheiner, and the all-star team they’ve assembled are to be congratulated on a book that lays out not only the shortcomings in the statistical system, but also its strengths and the obstacles that make improvements so difficult to achieve. This book will, I hope, inspire actions to fix some of the potholes in our current measurement methods.” -- Martin Neil Baily | Brookings Institution