Intangible capital and economic growth
By Carol Corrado, Charles R. Hulten, Dan Sichel. 2006
1,134 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than $3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add intangible capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8db96cc161320582ba4efe0d634a67cc9133089c
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In Economics and Econometrics
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In Strategy and Management
- Costas Arkolakis
- Edward C. Prescott
- A. Rodríguez-Clare
- Ellen R Mcgrattan
- John Van Reenen
- N. Ramondo
- Kesseven Padachi
- Simcha Barkai
Citations in the corpus
- Innovation and Production in the Global Economy (2018, background): “28 Corrado et al. (2014) extend their analysis of the income share of intangible capital to other OECD countries besides the United States.”
- Technology Capital and the U.S. Current Account (2009, positive): “This is consistent with estimates of Corrado et al. (2006). Depreciation rates for plant-specific capital and technology capital are taken to be 0 and 10 percent, respectively.”
- Market Power and Innovation in the Intangible Economy (2019, background): “…share of enterprise software is sold as a service (SaaS), which means that firms pay periodic licence fees instead of an upfront cost for perpetual use.23 Note that this does not mean that the model features no accumulation of intangible capital in the spirit of, e.g., Corrado et al. (2009).”
- Intangible Capital and the Investment-q Relation (2017, methodology): “Earlier versions of these data are used by Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2009) and Corrado and Hulten (2010).”
- Declining Labor and Capital Shares (2020, methodology): “Setup The conceptual framework for incorporating unobserved intangible capital follows Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2009) and McGrattan and Prescott (2010).”
- Intangible investment in Japan: measurement and contribution to economic growth (2007, positive): “In order to measure intangible investment, we follow the approach of Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel (2005, 2006) (abbreviated as CHS hereafter), who classify intangibles into three major types of assets: computerized information, innovative property, and economic competencies.”
- Intangible Capital and Firms Productivity (2011, neutral): “For instance Corrado et al. (2006) for the US firms estimate that total business investment in intangibles has roughly the same value of investment in tangible capital.”
- Economics and Statistics Administration (2007, background): “It is, hence, hard to independently calculate the depreciation rate of R&D capital (Corrado et al. 2006).”
- Depreciation of Business R&D Capital (2018, positive): “It is, hence, hard to independently calculate the depreciation rate of R&D capital (Corrado et al. 2006).”