Intangible Capital, the Labor Wedge and the Volatility of Corporate Profits

Keqiang Hou and Alok Johri

Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University

Abstract: Corporate profit is six times more volatile than output. We estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model with intangible capital (IC) using aggregate data on output, investment and hours and find that it generates profits that are over five times as volatile as output. A similar model without IC relies on preference shocks to generate profits that are 3.5 times as volatile as output. Variance decomposition analysis reveals that shocks to IC productivity account for 85 % of the variance of output, and over 50 % of hours and investment. The increased volatility of profits is associated with a time-varying wedge between wages and the marginal product of labor which is shown to be highly correlated with the data-based labor wedge. The estimation identifies the sixties and the nineties as periods of rapid IC accumulation.

Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2018-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/rsrch/papers/archive/2018-01.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Intangible Capital, the Labor Wedge and the Volatility of Corporate Profits (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mcm:deptwp:2018-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Department of Economics Working Papers from McMaster University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().