Survey evidence on the importance of bequests is fairly consistent. Dorothy Projector and Gertrude Weiss (1966), using the 1963 Survey of Financial Characteristics of Consumers, reported that only 17 percent of families had received any inheritance. Paul Menchik and Martin David (1983), using probate records of men who died in Wisconsin between 1947 and 1978, estimated that the average intergenerational bequest amounted to less than one-fifth of average household wealth in 1967 and about 10 percent of the average household wealth of families 65 or over in age. Michael Hurd and Gabriella Mundaca (1989) found from the 1984 Survey on the Economic Behavior of the Affluent data that only 12 percent of households in the top 10 percent of the income distribution reported that more than half their wealth came from gifts or inheritances, and only 9 percent in the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances. However, William Gale and J. K. Scholz (1994), using the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances, estimated that at least 51 percent of household wealth is accounted for by inheritances and other intentional wealth transfers. II. Data Sources and Methods

Charles R. Hulten's (1992) article suggested that very little of the productivity slowdown of the 1970's could be attributed to capital-embodied technical change. Hulten estimated that about 20 percent of total technical change (what he termed the residual growth of quality-adjusted output) in U.S. manufacturing over the period from 1949 to 1983 could be ascribed to embodied technical change in machinery and equipment. However, he found very little difference in the contribution of embodied technical change to total technical change between the periods 1949-1973 and 1974-1983, the slowdown period. In my paper (Wolff, 1991), I found a very significant vintage effect, estimated by the change in the average age of the capital stock. My data, drawn from Angus Maddison (1982), covered the G-7 countries over the period 1880-1979 and were based on figures for total capital (structures, machinery, and equipment) and for the entire economy. These results suggested that embodied technical change played a significant role in the productivity falloff of the 1970's. In this paper, I use more recent data for six OECD countries (France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States) compiled by Angus Maddison (1991, 1993a, b) and focus on the period from 1950 to 1989. I find here that the vintage effect is, indeed, a very strong determinant of the post-1973 productivity slowdown among OECD countries, explaining on average about two-fifths of the slowdown. The effect varies among countries, from a low of 23 percent in Japan to 69 percent in France. For the United States, the vintage effect appears to account for a little over half of its slowdown. Though it should be stressed that my results do not directly contradict those of Hulten, whose measure of technical change was confined to machinery and equipment within U.S. manufacturing, I will still attempt some reconciliation of my findings with those of Hulten at the end. The discrepancy in results suggests the possibility that the slowdown in investment in public infrastructure after 1973 may have played an important role in the post-1973 productivity slowdown. Moreover, since this is only a note, I will not review the rather extensive literature on the productivity slowdown of the 1970's (see, for example, Edward F. Denison's [1979] and my [Wolff, 1985] review articles), except to list a number of factors that have been examined. The main candidates have included the slowdown in the rate of capital formation, changes in the composition of the labor force, the role of energy price shocks, declines in R&D spending (and/ or the productivity of R&D), changes in the composition of output (mainly, the shift to services), and increased government regulation. Of these, the decline in investment appears to have played a major role, explaining about a fourth to a third of the slowdown in U.S. productivity growth after 1973. In Section I, I present the basic data for the analysis. The basic regression results are presented in Section II. In Section III, I consider other possible factors that may have played a role in the productivity slowdown of the 1970's. Section IV provides a decomposition of labor productivity growth into its various sources, including a vintage effect, estimated by changes in the average age of capital. Section V analyzes the relative importance of each component in the falloff of productivity growth observed among OECD countries after * Department of Economics, New York University, New York, NY 10003. The author would like to express appreciation to Moses Abramovitz, Charles Hulten, and two anonymous referees for their comments and to the Sloan Foundation and C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York University for financial support.

Catch-up in total factor productivity (TFP) among the group of seven was evident between 1870 adn 1979, though much slower before 1938 than after 1950. Capital:labor ratios also converged over the long period, though the process was much stronger after 1960. TFP catch-up is found to be positively associated with capital:labor growth and strongest when capital intensity is growing most rapidly. The United States overtook the United Kingdom in technological leadership in 1900 when its capital:labor growth was more than three times higher. The steady deterioration in the United Kingdom's relative TFP since 1900 and the United States' since 1950 are both associated with low rates of capital formation. Copyright 1991 by American Economic Association.

Marx's of the tendency of the rate of profit to has been the subject of much debate, both theoretical and empirical. The states that over time the organic composition of capital will tend to rise, thereby causing the general rate of profit to fall (vol. 3, ch. 13). At issue on the theoretical side are the analytical relations between the organic composition of capital and the general rate of profit and, more broadly, between labor values and prices of production. At issue on the empirical side are the actual movements of the organic composition and the general rate of profit over time. This paper will investigate both sides of this issue. The first part will develop and criticize the of the falling rate of profit. The presentation will rely heavily on the analytical apparatus developed for Marxian analysis over the last twenty years (see particularly Francis Seton, Michio Morishima and Seton, Paul Samuelson, Morishima, William Baumol, and John Roemer), as well as Jens Christiansen's review of the arguments. The major conclusion that will be drawn is that the general rate of profit does not necessarily move inversely to the organic composition of capital and there is thus no necessity for the rate of profit to fall with capitalist development. What remains of the law of the falling rate of profit is then the empirical question of whether in fact the rate of profit had fallen and, if so, what factors have contributed to its decline.' The second part of the paper will present empirical estimates of the general rate of profit, the organic composition of capital, and other key variables in the Marxian system for the 1947-67 period in the United States. The study is confined to this period because the required data (inputoutput tables) are available only for years 1947, 1958, 1963, and 1967. Two questions will be addressed. First, has the rate of profit fallen? Second, what is the observed relation of the rate of profit to the organic composition and other variables in the system? In this regard, particular attention will be paid to relative productivity increases over the period and their impact on the rate of profit, the organic composition, the rate of surplus value and other variables.

Puerto Rico's transformation from a preindustrial to an industralized economy in the period 1948-63 provides an opportunity to measure the impact of technological change on several basic parameters in a Marxian economic framework. The rate of surplus value (estimated using the Morishima-Seton transformation) remains relatively stable at 0.97 in 1948 and 0.93 in 1963, while the organic composition falls from 2.75 to 2.09. The stability in the rate of surplus value results from a 63 percent average fall in labor values counterbalanced by a 143 percent rise in labor's consumption. The rate of surplus value, when adjusted for trade flows, jumps to 1.31 in 1948 and 1.18 in 1963, due to Puerto Rico's large balance-of-trade deficit and the relative import intensity of labor's consumption.

Data are used for thirteen industrialized countries to investigate convergence of labor productivity levels in individual manufacturing industries over the 1963-82 period. The authors find convergence in virtually every manufacturing industry. Among these countries, the co efficient of variation of industry labor productivity declined in all but one of twenty-eight industries. However, productivity convergenc e is stronger for all manufacturing than within individual industries, especially heavy and high-technology industries. Also, variation in employment mix among countries plays little role in explaining cross-country differences i n aggregate manufacturing productivity, nor have changes in employment mixes been an important source of convergence. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.