TY  - JOUR
AU  - Corrado,Carol A.
AU  - Hulten,Charles R.
AU  - Sichel,Daniel E.
TI  - Intangible Capital and Economic Growth
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11948
PY  - 2006
Y2  - January 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11948
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11948.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Carol Corrado
3031 Beech St. NW
Washington, D.C.  20015
Tel: 202-966-7643
E-Mail: Carol.Corrado@conference-board.org

Charles R. Hulten
Department of Economics
University of Maryland
Room 3105, Tydings Hall
College Park, MD 20742
Tel: 301/405-3549
Fax: 301/405-3542
E-Mail: hulten@econ.umd.edu

Daniel Sichel
 Federal Reserve Board
Mail Stop #66
20th and Constitution, NW
Washington, DC 20551
Tel: 202/452-2530
Fax: 202/452-5296
E-Mail: Dan.Sichel@frb.gov
AB  - Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than $3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.
ER  -