In recent years, US investment has been lackluster, despite rising valuations. Key explanations include growing rents and growing intangibles. We propose and estimate a framework to quantify their roles. The gap between valuations -- reflected in average Q -- and investment -- reflected in...

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies over the period 1982--2006 averaged 9.4 percent annually after taxes; U.S. subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3.2 percent. Two factors distort...

During the 1990s, market hours in the United States rose dramatically. The rise in hours occurred as gross domestic product (GDP) per hour was declining relative to its historical trend, an occurrence that makes this boom unique, at least for the postwar U.S. economy. We find that expensed plus...

We examine the relationship between the intellectual capital of scientists making frontier discoveries, the presence of great university bioscience programs, the presence of venture capital firms, other economic variables, and the founding of U.S. biotechnology enterprises during 1976-1989....

In this paper, we first provide evidence that existing measures of business incomes and valuations based on widely-used surveys such as the Survey of Consumer Finances are mismeasured. We then develop a theory disciplined by U.S. national accounts and business census data to measure net incomes...

We document the role of intangible capital in manufacturing firms' substantial contribution to non-manufacturing employment growth from 1977-2019. Exploiting data on firms' "auxiliary" establishments, we develop a novel measure of proprietary in-house knowledge and show that it is associated...

We propose a model that starts from the premise that intangible capital needs to be stored on some medium --- software, patents, essential employees --- before it can be utilized in production. Storage implies that intangible capital may be partially non-rival within the firm, leading to scale...

Recent research on financial market valuation of the knowledge assets of publicly traded firms is surveyed. The motivation for using a market value equation to price knowledge assets is discussed and the theory behind this equation is briefly presented. Then the empirical literature that relates...

Household R&D (or household innovation) is an important source of innovation that has to date been largely overlooked in research related to national accounts. Indeed, it is not currently counted as investment in the literatures on household production and human capital. This paper develops time...

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...