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There is substantial evidence on the importance of education as a driver of earnings, productivity, and economic growth. However, knowledge of the specific role of associate's degrees in U.S. economic growth is limited. We analyze the sources of U.S. economic growth and identify the contribution of associate's degree holders to improvements in earnings, labor quality, productivity, and overall economic growth. We find evidence that substitution toward workers with associate's degrees has increased U.S. earnings, aggregate labor quality, and productivity, and that these effects are concentrated in the health care, trade, and government sectors. While the average educational attainment of people entering the labor force has plateaued, our results suggest that shifting workers from some college to associate degrees could improve earnings, the quality of the workforce, productivity, and growth, potentially without more time spent in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The USDA Economic Research Service has emerged as an acknowledged intellectual leader in the construction and integration of national and state-level productivity accounts in agriculture. The national and state-level ERS productivity measures are widely referred to and used, and international sectoral comparisons rely on the ERS production accounts for foundation methodology in constructing agricultural productivity accounts in other countries. This leadership role has endured for many decades and accelerated in response to the AAEA-USDA Task Force review of the agricultural productivity accounts (Gardner et al. 1980). It is against this backdrop of vigorous intellectual leadership that an external review committee has examined the data sources, methodology, ongoing research, documentation, and reporting of the ERS agricultural productivity accounts. Our recommendations are many and some are substantial. Two of the most important recommendations address overarching concerns of documentation and efficiency, two more consider website communication of methods and data, and four focus on the renewal and construction of the state-level accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid productivity growth in the US during the Information Age, prior to the dot-com bust in 2000, and the large contribution of the IT producing sector, is well known. Less known are the sources of the surprisingly rapid TFP growth during the slow growth period after 2000. We construct an account of US economic growth by aggregating over detailed industries using a new data set based on the NAICS classification. We find that, post 2000, TFP originating from the IT-Producing sector decelerated relative to the IT boom, but still accounted for 40% of aggregate productivity growth. This deceleration was counterbalanced by the contribution from IT-Using sectors, which buoyed aggregate TFP growth to almost the same rate as the 1995-2000 period. For aggregate GDP, the contributions to the growth rate of 2.8% during 2000-2007 were: capital input (1.7% points), labor input (0.4) and TFP (0.7). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide detailed information on the crucial role of information technology in the postwar growth of the U.S. economy, from the development of the telecommunications services and the telecommunications equipment industries through the successful commercialization of semiconductor technology and the ongoing shift to cloud-based IT services. Our industry-level data set reveals that productivity gains over the postwar period originated disproportionally in industries that produce IT, but the replication of established technologies through growth of capital and labor inputs explains by far the largest proportion of U.S. economic growth. We find that the substantial growth deceleration during the Great Recession was driven by modestly negative aggregate productivity growth, but that only a minor portion of the drop in the growth rate was due to the IT-producing industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Low socioeconomic status predicts inferior clinical outcomes in many patient populations. The effects of patient insurance status and hospital safety-net status on readmission rates following acute myocardial infarction are unclear. Materials & methods: A retrospective review of State Inpatient Databases for New York, California, Florida and Maryland, 2007-2014. Results:  A total of 1,055,162 patients were included. Medicaid status was associated with 37.7 and 44.0% increases in risk-adjusted readmission odds at 30 and 90 days (p < 0.0001). Uninsured status was associated with reduced odds of readmission at both time points. High-burden safety-net status was associated with 9.6 and 9.5% increased odds of readmission at 30 and 90 days (p < 0.0003). Conclusion: Insurance status and hospital safety-net burden affect readmission odds following acute myocardial infarction.