How Productive is Public Capital? A Meta-Analysis

By P. Bom, Jenny E. Ligthart. Social Science Research Network, 2008

130 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The paper analyzes the contribution of public capital to private output using several metaanalytical techniques. Both fixed and random effects models are estimated by Weighted Least Squares. Sample overlap across studies is explicitly controlled for by employing a `full' Generalized Least Squares estimator. The weighted average output elasticity of public capital amounts to 0.08 after correcting for publication bias. A substantial part of the heterogeneity across studies is explained by study design parameters, such as econometric specification, estimation technique, empirical model, type of public capital, and level of aggregation of public capital data. The large elasticities of public capital found in the early literature seem to be caused by either unidentified (but present) cointegrating relationships or spurious relationships in national time series.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc11a959a9e17f17b0303139c9baaf4ad3f3d4f6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

The productivity of transport infrastructure investment: A meta-analysis of empirical evidence (2013, background): “There are various survey papers (Munnell, 1992; Gramlich, 1994; Rietveld, 1994; Boarnet, 1997; Banister and Berechman, 2000; De La Fuente, 2000, 2010), and some meta-analyses (Button, 1998; Bom and Ligthart, 2008; Bom and Ligthart, 2009), on the productivity of public capital.”
Is Infrastructure Capital Productive? A Dynamic Heterogeneous Approach (2011, unknown): “7 This is very close to the value that emerges from the meta-study by Bom and Ligthart (2008) of the output elasticity of public capital.”
Education and Economic Growth: A Meta-Regression Analysis (2014, background): “Papers reporting insignificant results are either not submitted for publication or routinely rejected by the editors/referees (Bom and Ligthart, 2008).”
Infrastructure and Development: A Critical Appraisal of the Macro-level Literature (2008, background): “10, while Bom and Ligthart ( 2008 ), in a meta-analysis of 67 studies using public capital measures, come up with an unconditional output elasticity of public capital of around 0.”