This paper presents a new approach to assess the role of price mismeasurement in the productivity slowdown. I invert the firms investment decision to identify the embodied and disembodied components of productivity growth. With a Cobb-Douglas production function, output price mismeasurement only should affect the latter. Contrary to the mismeasurement hypothesis, I find that in the Post-War period, disembodied productivity grew faster in the hard-to-measure than in the non-manufacturing easy-to-measure sectors, and that disembodied productivity slowed down less in the hard-to-measure than in the easy-to-measure sectors since the 70s. These results hold a fortiori when capital and labor are complements.

Abraham, Arpad / Carceles-Poveda , Eva / Cavalcanti, Tiago / Kambourov, Gueorgui / Lambertini, Luisa / Ruhl, Kim / Tavares, Jose
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Using Investment Data to Assess the Importance of Price Mismeasurement
Diego A Comin1
1NYU, diego.comin@nyu.edu
Citation Information: Topics in Macroeconomics. Volume 6, Issue 1, Pages –, ISSN (Online) 1534-5998, DOI: 10.2202/1534-5998.1396, April 2006
Publication History:
- Published Online:
- 2006-04-12
Keywords: investment; price mismeasurement; productivity slowdown; total factor productivity; embodied and disembodied productivity


















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