TY  - JOUR
AU  - Comin,Diego A.
AU  - Hobijn,Bart
AU  - Rovito,Emilie
TI  - World Technology Usage Lags
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12677
PY  - 2006
Y2  - November 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12677
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12677.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Diego A. Comin
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
Tel: 617/495-5011
E-Mail: dcomin@hbs.edu

Bart Hobijn
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Economic Research Department, Mailstop 1130
101 Market Street, 11th floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: 415 974 2314
Fax: 415 974 2168
E-Mail: bart.hobijn@sf.frb.org

Emilie Rovito
Domestic Research Function
Federal Reserve Bank of New York
33 Liberty St.
New York, NY 10045
E-Mail: no email available
AB  - We present evidence on the differences in the intensity with which ten major technologies are used in 185 countries across the world. We do so by calculating how many years ago these technologies were used in the U.S. at the same intensity as they are used in the countries in our sample. We denote these time lags as technology usage lags and compare them with lags in real GDP per capita. We find that (i) technology usage lags are large, often comparable to lags in real GDP per capita, (ii) usage lags are highly correlated with lags in per-capita income, and (iii) usage lags are highly correlated across technologies. The productivity differentials between the state of the art technologies that we consider and the ones they replace combined with the usage lags that we document, lead us to infer that technology usage disparities might account for a large part of cross-country TFP differentials.
ER  -