This paper presents a new approach to assess the role of price mismeasurement in the productivity slowdown. I invert the firm's investment decision to identify the embodied and disembodied components of productivity growth. With a Cobb-Douglas production function, output price mismeasurement only should affect the latter. Contrary to the mismeasurement hypothesis, I find that in the Post-War period, disembodied productivity grew faster in the hard-to-measure than in the non-manufacturing easy-to-measure sectors, and that disembodied productivity slowed down less in the hard-to-measure than in the easy- to-measure sectors since the 70's. These results hold a fortiori when capital and labor are complements.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Macroeconomics with number
0306006.
Length: 38 pages Date of creation: 09 Jun 2003 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpma:0306006
Note: Type of Document - acrobat pdf; prepared on IBM PC ; to print on HP; pages: 38; figures: included Contact details of provider: Web page: http://129.3.20.41
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