Technological Progress, Obsolescence and Depreciation

Raouf Boucekkine (), Fernando del Río and Blanca Martinez ()

No 2006015, Discussion Papers (ECON - Département des Sciences Economiques) from Université catholique de Louvain, Département des Sciences Economiques

Abstract: We construct a vintage capital model à la Whelan (2002) with both exogenous embodied and disembodied technical progress, and variable utilization of each vintage. The lifetime of capital goods is endogenous and it relies on the associated maintenance costs. We study the properties of the balanced growth paths. First, we show that the lifetime of capital is an increasing (resp. decreasing) function of the rate of disembodied (resp.embodied) technical progress. Second, we show that both the use-related depreciation rate and the scrapping rate incease when embodied technical progress accelerates. However, the latter drops when disembodied technical progress accelerates while the former remains unaffected. A key feature of our model is that the age-related depreciation rate does depend on the obsolescence rate in sharp contrast to the neoclassical model.

Keywords: Vintage capital; operation costs; embodied technical progress; age-related depreciation; obsolescence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E22 E32 O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2006-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dev, nep-dge and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Technological progress, obsolescence, and depreciation (2009)
Working Paper: Technological progress, obsolescence, and depreciation (2009)
Working Paper: Technological progress obsolescence and depreciation (2006)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ctl:louvec:2006015

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