Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement
-
Diego A Comin
Abstract
This paper presents a new approach to assess the role of price mismeasurement in the productivity slowdown. I invert the firm’s investment decision to identify the embodied and disembodied components of productivity growth. With a Cobb-Douglas production function, output price mismeasurement only should affect the latter. Contrary to the mismeasurement hypothesis, I find that in the Post-War period, disembodied productivity grew faster in the hard-to-measure than in the non-manufacturing easy-to-measure sectors, and that disembodied productivity slowed down less in the hard-to-measure than in the easy-to-measure sectors since the 70’s. These results hold a fortiori when capital and labor are complements.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Heterogeneity in Price Stickiness and the Real Effects of Monetary Shocks
- Frontiers Article
- 10.2202/1534-6013.1320
- Advances Article
- Monetary Policy and Uncertainty about the Natural Unemployment Rate: Brainard-Style Conservatism versus Experimental Activism
- Quantifying the Effects of the Demographic Transition in Developing Economies
- Inflation, Prices, and Information in Competitive Search
- Contributions Article
- Inflation Inertia in Sticky Information Models
- Job Separation Under Uncertainty and the Wage Distribution
- A Closed Form Solution to the Ramsey Model
- Convergence and Stability in U.S. Employment Rates
- What Does the Solow Model Tell Us about Economic Growth?
- Consumption and Health
- Capital Maintenance versus Technology Adoption Under Embodied Technical Progress
- Let a Thousand Models Bloom: The Advantages of Making the FOMC a Truly 'Open Market'
- Does Inflation Grease the Wheels of the Labor Market?
- The Relative Price and Relative Productivity Channels for Aggregate Fluctuations
- A Search-Theoretic Monetary Business Cycle Model with Capital Formation
- Price-Level Determinacy, Lower Bounds on the Nominal Interest Rate, and Liquidity Traps
- Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression: The Abandonment of the Abstentionist Viewpoint
- Topics Article
- Contracts and Money Revisited
- On the Use of Substitutability as a Measure of Competition
- Can the AK Model Be Rescued? New Evidence from Unit Root Tests with Good Size and Power
- How Tight Should One's Hands be Tied? Fear of Floating and the Credibility of Exchange Rate Regimes
- Uncertainty and Debt-Maturity in Emerging Markets
- Quantitative Monetary Easing and Risk in Financial Asset Markets
- Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement
- Biased Technical Change and Capital-Labour Substitution in Finland, 1902-2003
- Long-Run Money Growth and the Liquidity Effect
- Differentiability of the Efficient Frontier when Commitment to Risk Sharing is Limited
- A Model of Veblenian Growth
- Human Capital Composition, R&D and the Increasing Role of Services
- The Allocation of Labor and Endogenous Search Decisions
- Bank Lending with Imperfect Competition and Spillover Effects
- Convergence Across Italian Regions and the Role of Technological Catch-Up
Articles in the same Issue
- Heterogeneity in Price Stickiness and the Real Effects of Monetary Shocks
- Frontiers Article
- 10.2202/1534-6013.1320
- Advances Article
- Monetary Policy and Uncertainty about the Natural Unemployment Rate: Brainard-Style Conservatism versus Experimental Activism
- Quantifying the Effects of the Demographic Transition in Developing Economies
- Inflation, Prices, and Information in Competitive Search
- Contributions Article
- Inflation Inertia in Sticky Information Models
- Job Separation Under Uncertainty and the Wage Distribution
- A Closed Form Solution to the Ramsey Model
- Convergence and Stability in U.S. Employment Rates
- What Does the Solow Model Tell Us about Economic Growth?
- Consumption and Health
- Capital Maintenance versus Technology Adoption Under Embodied Technical Progress
- Let a Thousand Models Bloom: The Advantages of Making the FOMC a Truly 'Open Market'
- Does Inflation Grease the Wheels of the Labor Market?
- The Relative Price and Relative Productivity Channels for Aggregate Fluctuations
- A Search-Theoretic Monetary Business Cycle Model with Capital Formation
- Price-Level Determinacy, Lower Bounds on the Nominal Interest Rate, and Liquidity Traps
- Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression: The Abandonment of the Abstentionist Viewpoint
- Topics Article
- Contracts and Money Revisited
- On the Use of Substitutability as a Measure of Competition
- Can the AK Model Be Rescued? New Evidence from Unit Root Tests with Good Size and Power
- How Tight Should One's Hands be Tied? Fear of Floating and the Credibility of Exchange Rate Regimes
- Uncertainty and Debt-Maturity in Emerging Markets
- Quantitative Monetary Easing and Risk in Financial Asset Markets
- Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement
- Biased Technical Change and Capital-Labour Substitution in Finland, 1902-2003
- Long-Run Money Growth and the Liquidity Effect
- Differentiability of the Efficient Frontier when Commitment to Risk Sharing is Limited
- A Model of Veblenian Growth
- Human Capital Composition, R&D and the Increasing Role of Services
- The Allocation of Labor and Endogenous Search Decisions
- Bank Lending with Imperfect Competition and Spillover Effects
- Convergence Across Italian Regions and the Role of Technological Catch-Up