The Division of Productivity Research and Program Development (DPRPD)
works on strengthening and improving Bureau productivity measures and on understanding
the sources and effects of productivity and technical change. The Division works on clarifying
input and output concepts, using methods from microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, labor economics,
industrial organization, econometrics, and statistics. Staff time is devoted partly to
individual, long term research on theoretical and empirical topics and writing
working papers and publications.
The Division also works on projects jointly with the
other productivity programs. For example, staff members worked with analysts from
the Division of Major Sector Productivity to develop more timely measures of multifactor productivity
and to determine the effect of labor composition and research and development (R&D) on productivity growth.
Current research includes:
- Evaluating the accuracy of estimates of self-employment hours by comparing them to time diaries
- Developing better R&D measures in each industry
- Developing measures of manufacturing productivity in each U.S. state
- Evaluating the accuracy of measures of materials purchased from foreign countries
- Developing labor composition measures for individual industries
- Evaluating whether industry productivity measures are comparable across countries
