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Journal Article
Investment-specific technology growth: concepts and recent estimates
The strength of U.S. productivity growth in recent years has been attributed to technological improvements that are, in some sense, embodied in new types of capital equipment. However, traditional growth theory and growth accounting techniques?which emphasize the role of disembodied, neutral technological progress?are deficient in explaining this phenomenon. In this article, Michael R. Pakko outlines a model of investment-specific technological change that has become popular for describing the notion of capital-embodied growth and summarizes some recent estimates of the importance of this ...
Journal Article
Currency boards: monetary magic?
Journal Article
There are two sides to every (employment redistribution) story!
Journal Article
Capital deepening
Journal Article
The high-tech investment boom and economic growth in the 1990s: accounting for quality
The rapid pace of economic growth in the 1990s was associated with an increasingly prominent role for investment, particularly for information processing and communications technologies. Given the evident pace of technological advancement in these sectors, official economic statistics have been constructed to take careful account of improvements in the quality of these high-tech capital goods. In this article, Michael R. Pakko examines the possibility that this selective accounting for quality improvement has distorted the true importance of high-tech investment in recent economic growth ...
Working Paper
What happens when the technology growth trend changes?: transition dynamics, capital growth and the "new economy"
The rapid increase in U.S. economic growth during the late 1990s inspired speculation that an acceleration in the rate of technological progress had given rise to an increase in potential output growth. This paper considers the transition dynamics associated with such a change using a general equilibrium framework that incorporates stochastic growth trends. The model suggests that transition dynamics associated with a shift in the technological growth trend can have important implications for macroeconomic growth patterns, particularly when technological change is investment-specific. ...
Working Paper
R&D spending and cyclical fluctuations: putting the "technology" in technology shocks
We examine the dynamic properties of an endogenous growth model with an explicit R&D sector in order to evaluate its ability to propagate temporary disturbances into persistent fluctuations in macroeconomic variables. We demonstrate that a large proportion of the variability and persistence of measured Solow residuals can be thought of as reflecting the endogenous accumulation and adaptation of technical knowledge rather than simply exogenous processes. By explicitly modeling R&D, we use a framework in which it is possible to explicitly consider the role of technology in "technology shocks."
Journal Article
Future oil
Journal Article
Comparing apples and oranges
Tracking prices over time is easy when the object in question doesn't change much-say, an orange. But the process is difficult when there are frequent changes in the quality of the item-say, an Apple computer. Hedonics provides the solution.
Journal Article
Monetary policy in jobless recoveries