Conventional measures of business investment consist primarily of tangible assets such as plant and equipment, vehicles, office buildings and other commercial structures. Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2009) show business investment in intangibles (software, design, R&D, branding,...

This paper looks at the channels through which intangible assets affect productivity. The econometric analysis exploits a new dataset on intangible investment (INTAN-Invest) in conjunction with EUKLEMS productivity estimates for 10 EU member states from 1998 to 2007. We find that (a) the...

We study bargained input prices where up and downstream firms can choose alternative vertical partners. We apply our model to airport landing fees where a number of interesting policy questions have arisen. For example, what is the impact of joint ownership of airports? Does airline...

This paper provides an update of the NESTA Innovation Index and tries to calculate some facts for the 'knowledge economy'. Building on the work of Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (CHS, 2005,9), using new data sets and a new micro survey, we (1) document UK intangible investment and (2) see how it...

The U.K. skill premium fell from the 1950s to the late 1970s and then rose very sharply. This paper examines the contributions to these relative wage movements of international trade and technical change. We first measure trade as changes in product prices and technical change as TFP growth....

The usual analysis of privatization and X-inefficiency uses agency theory to model managerial effort. We model worker effort as determined by a bargain between firms and workers. Workers dislike effort because it lowers utility. Firms prefer high effort because it raises productivity....

Almost all studies of skilled/unskilled employment over the 1980s use data on manuals and non-manuals to measure skill. This paper constructs data on skilled/unskilled employment using occupational data from the UK New Earnings Survey Panel Data set. It merges these data with other product and...

We compare the trade and labour approaches to wage inequality. We first look at the theoretical differences, stressing the different roles ascribed to sector and factor bias, labour supply and the theory of technical change in trade models with endogenous prices. We then briefly review some of...

Pressure on public finances has increased scrutiny of public support for innovation. We examine two particular issues. First, there have been many recent calls for the (relatively new) UK R&D subsidy to be extended to other "research" activities, such as software. Second, argument still rages...

An extensive literature on the convergence of productivity between countries examines whether productivity is pulled towards the global frontier country, perhaps due to learning and knowledge spillovers. More recently, studies within countries use the wide dispersion of productivity across firms...