We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct a new measure of the neoclassical fundamentals that drive investment spending. We find that investment responds significantly to our new measure of fundamentals but is insensitive to cash flow, even for firms typically thought to be...

This paper examines the prices for communications equipment, an important component of information technology. Unlike prices for computers which officially fall sharply every year, the official prices for communications equipment have barely budged over the past decade. This paper combines...

The recent literature on the sources of economic growth has challenged the traditional growth accounting of the Solow model, which assigned a relatively limited role to capital deepening. As part of this literature, De Long and Summers have argued in two papers that the link between equipment...

Productivity growth in the U.S. economy jumped during the second half of the 1990s, a resurgence that many analysts linked to information technology (IT). However, shortly after this consensus emerged, demand for IT products fell sharply, leading to a lively debate about the connection between...

We use a national dataset of land sales to construct land price indexes for 23 MSAs in the United States and for the aggregate of those MSAs. We construct the price indexes by estimating hedonic regressions with a large sample of land transactions dating back to the mid-1990s. The regressions...

This paper analyzes the sources of recent U.S. productivity growth using both aggregate and industry-level data. The paper confirms the central role of information technology in the productivity revival during 1995-2000 and shows that it played a significant, although smaller, role after 2000....