IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/kthrec/2013_018.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Quality change and implications for productivity development: Housing construction in Sweden 1990-2010

Author

Listed:
  • Borg, Lena

    (Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology)

  • Song, Han-Suck

    (Department of Real Estate and Construction Management, Royal Institute of Technology)

Abstract

Current estimation procedures for computing building price indexes do not in an adequate way account for changes in the quality of new residential construction which results in upward biases of price changes, and consequently causes published productivity changes to be too low due to overdeflation. The aim of this study is to estimate productivity figures that take quality changes into account. Knowledge about the size of quality changes is important to quantify the "true" level of cost increases in the residential construction sector in order to obtain more reliable productivity development figures. This paper shows that measured productivity in the residential construction sector has been underestimated since 1990s. The findings imply that data collection for productivity calculations should be more detailed and rigorous in order to measure quality changes. It highlights the potential improvement that can be done in the calculations of productivity changes.

Suggested Citation

  • Borg, Lena & Song, Han-Suck, 2013. "Quality change and implications for productivity development: Housing construction in Sweden 1990-2010," Working Paper Series 13/18, Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Real Estate and Construction Management & Banking and Finance.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:kthrec:2013_018
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ekeb9wpgu2wc6ro/WP201318.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    productivity; construction; quality;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L74 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Primary Products and Construction - - - Construction
    • O33 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
    • O47 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - Empirical Studies of Economic Growth; Aggregate Productivity; Cross-Country Output Convergence
    • R31 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Housing Supply and Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:kthrec:2013_018. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Cecilia Hermansson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifkthse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.