Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement

Diego Comin ()

Working Papers from C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University

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.

Keywords: INVESTMENT; PRICE MISMEASUREMENT; PRODUCTIVITY SLOWDOWN; TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY; EMBODIED AND DISEMBODIED PRODUCTIVITY (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C6 D9 E2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
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Working Paper: Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement (2004)
Working Paper: Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement (2003)
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