We write this essay for both lay readers and scientists, though mainstream economists are welcome to enjoy it too. Our subject is the basic toolbox of mainstream economics. The most important tools in this box are demand, supply and equilibrium. All mainstream economists – as well as many...

We attempt to replicate for the UK the Corrado, Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2006) work on spending on intangible assets in the US. Their work suggests private sector expenditure (investment) on intangibles is about 13% (11%) of US GDP 1998-2000, with intangible investment about equal to tangible...

A major puzzle is that despite the apparent importance of innovation around the knowledge economy, UK macro performance appears unaffected: investment rates are flat, and productivity has slowed down. We investigate whether measurement issues might account for the puzzle. The standard National...

Recent empirical findings on firms' expenditure towards the creation and acquisition of knowledge goods, otherwise known as intangibles, suggest that their share in overall investment has grown considerably. Still, intangible investment is rarely present in investment models. In this paper, I...

Recent empirical findings on firms’ expenditure towards the creation and acquisition of knowledge goods, otherwise known as intangibles, suggest that their share in overall investment has grown considerably. Still, intangible investment is rarely present in investment models. In this paper, I...

This paper compares the productivity growth of a set of Canadian and U.S. regulated industries. Using data from Statistics Canada's KLEMS database and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the paper examines productivity growth in transportation services (which includes air and rail),...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...

Official data from statistical agencies are not always ideal for cross-country comparisons because of differences in data sources and methodology. Analysts who engage in cross-country comparisons need to carefully choose among alternatives and sometimes adapt data especially for their purposes....

I propose a new decomposition of aggregate total factor productivity. I model productivity as an index of unmeasured factors of production, and decompose the conditional factor demand for this index. With this model of productivity, changes in the price of labor or capital cause substitution to...

Two alternative measures of demand adjusted capital input for the U.S. non-farm private business sector are derived and their differential impacts on the potential supply of output are compared to those obtained using the unadjusted index of capital input published by the Congressional Budget...