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Working Paper
R&D Capital and the Idea Production Function
We supplement the “Idea Production Function” (IPF), whereby research and development (R&D) activity leads to growth, with measures of R&D capital. We construct the R&D capital stock in the United States and estimate the IPF with patent applications as R&D output, allowing for a flexible treatment of R&D productivity (over 1968–2019). The estimated substitution elasticity between R&D inputs is 0.7−0.8, which suggests that R&D capital is an essential factor in producing ideas and complementary to R&D labor. We identify a positive trend in R&D labor productivity (roughly 1 percent) and a ...
Working Paper
Real exchange rate forecasting and ppp: this time the random walk loses
This paper brings four new insights into the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) debate. First, we show that a half-life PPP (HL) model is able to forecast real exchange rates better than the random walk (RW) model at both short and long-term horizons. Second, we find that this result holds if the speed of adjustment to the sample mean is calibrated at reasonable values rather than estimated. Third, we find that it is preferable to calibrate, rather than to elicit as a prior, the parameter determining the speed of adjustment to PPP. Fourth, for most currencies in our sample, the HL model ...