Technology and Capital Formation

Capital formation is the most important source of economic growth, and investment in new capital interacts in key ways with the diffusion of new technology. The contributions in this book bring a wealth of detailed empirical data and an unusually wide range of perspectives - from universities, government, and business - to bear on the exploration of this important interrelationship; they focus, in particular, on the role of capital in the production process. Grouped into three broad categories, they take up the rate of technological advance and investment in computers, the relative efficiency of new and old capital goods, and the translation of capital formation into productive inputs in the private and government sectors of the U.S. economy.Dale W. Jorgenson looks at previous research to explain the controversy that began in the 1960s regarding capital as a factor of production. Computer prices are examined extensively and in great detail in two important studies by Ellen Dulberger and Robert Gordon, while Jack Triplett discusses the economic and engineering literature on the subject. Empirical research by Charles Hulten, James Robertson, and Frank Wykoff disproves the hypothesis that deterioration in the efficiency of older capital goods as a result of the 1970s energy crisis explains the subsequent slowdown in production growth. Wykoff offers a particularly rich study of the depreciation of business leased automobiles.Other contributors and subjects include Paul Pieper on the state of construction price statistics; Michael Harper, Ernst Berndt, and David Wood on alternative approaches to measuring the rate of return; John Strong on the market value of debt claims in U.S. financial markets; Dianne and Laurits Christensen, Carl Degen and Philip Schoech on the U.S. Postal Service; Michael Boskin, Marc Robinson and John Roberts on estimating federal government capital and net investment; and Ralph Landau on the interrelationship of technology and capital formation.Dale W. Jorgenson is Frederick Eaton Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Ralph Landau is Consulting Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and a Fellow of the Faculty of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.