As production comes to depend more on intangible productive assets, the location of production by multinational firms becomes increasingly ambiguous. The reason is that, within the firm, these assets have no clear geographical location, but only a nominal location determined by the firm's tax or...

Many studies measure capital stocks and effective tax rates for different industries, but they consider only tangible assets such as equipment, structures, inventories, and land. Some of these studies also have estimated that the welfare cost of tax differences among these assets under prior law...

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more...

Existing standards prohibit disclosures of internally created intangible capital to firm balance sheets, resulting in a downward bias of reported assets. To characterize off-balance sheet intangible assets, we use transaction prices to estimate this missing intangible capital. On average, our...

We document that the rise of factors such as software, intellectual property, brand, and innovative business processes, collectively known as “intangible capital” can explain much of the weakness in physical capital investment since 2000. Moreover, intangibles have distinct economic features...

While there has been significant research to explore the determinants (and frictions) of foreign direct investment (FDI), past literature primarily focuses on country-wide FDI patterns with little examination of sectoral heterogeneity in FDI. Anecdotally, there is substantial sectoral...

Many important markets, such as the housing market, involve goods that are both indivisible and of budgetary significance. We introduce new graph theoretic techniques ideally suited to analyzing such markets. In this paper and its companion (Caplin and Leahy [2010]), we use these techniques to...

Because firms invest heavily in R&D, software, brands, and other intangible assets—at a rate close to that of tangible assets—changes in measured GDP, which does not include all intangible investments, understate the actual changes in total output. If changes in the labor input are more...

Real risk-free interest rates have trended down over the past 30 years. Puzzlingly in light of this decline, (1) the return on private capital has remained stable or even increased, creating an increasing wedge with safe interest rates; (2) stock market valuation ratios have increased only...

The basic neoclassical growth model accounts well for the postwar cyclical behavior of the U.S. economy prior to the 1990s, provided that variations in population growth, depreciation rates, total factor productivity, and taxes are incorporated. For the 1990s, the model predicts a depressed...