Technology and obsolescence: A reinterpretation of the specific-factor model of production

We develop a two sector general equilibrium model with a continuum of sector-specific capital goods in each sector, where each capital good represents a particular type of technology. Even without the standard assumptions usually made in the context of specific-factor models, similar results are derived. This framework is used to analyze the impacts of growth and technological change on the degree of obsolescence in each sector. Innovation and an increasing capital stock increase the degree of obsolescence. On the other hand, growth of labor and modernization of existing technologies reduce the stock of obsolete capital.The paper has benefitted from the comments of the seminar participants at Rutgers University, Cornell University, Columbia University, and at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta. Special thanks are due to Subhasis Gangopadhyay for helpful suggestions. Comments from two anonymous referees of this journal were extremely rewarding. The usual disclaimer applies.     

The vintage effect in TFP-growth: An analysis of the age structure of capital

The age structure of capital plays an important role in the measurement of productivity. It has been argued that the slowdown in the 1970s can be ascribed to the aging of the stock of capital. In this paper, we incorporate the age structure in productivity measurement. One proposition proves that Nelson's [Nelson, R.R., 1964. Aggregate production functions and medium-range growth projections. American Economic Review 54 (September), 575–605] formula is only an approximation. Our final proposition shows that inclusion of the vintage effect prompts an upward correction of measured productivity growth in times of an aging stock of capital. Here capital ages if the investment/capital ratio falls short of the inverse of the capital age, as a first proposition shows. The analysis rests on a rigorous accounting for vintages. We translate the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ age of capital data into a measure of rates of obsolescence. Empirically, the correction of productivity growth for the vintage effect requires an estimate of the obsolescence and depreciation parameters on the basis of age data. The results indicate that the use of capital stock in efficiency units does cause some smoothing of total factor productivity growth over time. In the 1950s, when investment accelerated, the vintage-adjusted capital growth rate well exceeded the BEA growth rate, and vintage-adjusted TFP-growth is significantly lower than unadjusted TFP-growth. The measured productivity slowdown of the 1970s is somewhat ameliorated.     

On the importance of the embodiment of technology effect: A comment on Denison's growth accounting methodology

Denison has presented a powerful set of arguments as to why technology embodiment is not important. While his argument that embodiment does not appreciably raise the rate of return of new investment is correct, it leaves out the effect of obsolescence on measurement of the rate of return on all investment. Correctly handled, adjustment for obsolescence raises the estimated contribution of investment to growth. His calculations of the effect of new investment on average age ignore the increased retirement of old capital caused by new investment.     

Time-to-build, obsolescence and the technological paradox

The paper focusses on the technological paradox. To analyze the possible temporary negative effect of an innovation we make use of a flow representation of production. Our aim is to show that such phenomenon can be justified by a simple property of the production process: in real time costs strictly come before proceeds. Moving in the same direction of Amendola (1972), and extending an overlooked result in Belloc (1980), we analyze the obsolescence effect induced by a rise in the interest rate. Furthermore, we analyze the role of capital market stickiness on the timing of the technological paradox and on the distribution of the obsolescence effect among the different stages of a vertical integrated production system.     

DEPRECIATION, OBSOLESCENCE AND THE ROLE OF CAPITAL IN GROWTH ACCOUNTING

Maurice Scott has argued that the neoclassical production function and growth accounting are fundamentally flawed as tools for understanding the growth process. If the role of capital were correctly evaluated, then (he argues) the famous 'residual' of growth accounting would disappear. Contrary to these claims, this paper seeks to show that growth accounting gives correct answers to interesting questions, even when all technical progress is embodied in new capital goods and even when depreciation is entirely due to obsolescence.     

Moore's Law and Learning by Doing

We model Moore's law as efficiency of computer producers that rises as a by-product of their experience. We find the following: (1) Because computer prices fall much faster than the prices of electricity-driven and diesel-driven capital ever did, growth in the coming decades should be very fast. (2) The obsolescence of firms today occurs faster than before, partly because the physical capital they own becomes obsolete faster. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: O3.     

Schumpeterian Growth with Gradual Product Obsolescence

The model in this article captures several important aspects of the real world: gradual obsolescence of goods in the form of gradually declining net profit derived from each product until it is phased out, expanding variety of goods over time, and both dynamic and static internal increasing returns to scale of production. To eliminate the scale effect, Jones's specification that gives rise to a semiendogenous rate of innovation is adopted. The most interesting finding of the article is that, when the research duplication effect is small (large) relative to the intertemporal knowledge spillover effect in R and D, the decentralized market delivers insufficient (excessive) obsolescence and allocates too little (much) labor to R and D, while a small subsidy (tax) to innovation is welfare-improving. All these results hold because the positive knowledge spillover externality overwhelms (is overwhelmed by) the negative research duplication externality.     

Natural resources,technological progress,and economic modernization

The present inquiry focuses on the modernization perspectives of the commodity‐exporting countries through the lens of development economics. To this end, the study adopts the Kaldorian framework to address the modernization effects, epitomized in the absorption of surplus labor. To trace the process of economic modernization, the study augments Lewis’s dualistic economy model by the extractive sector. Three different scenarios for the management of resource revenues are scrutinized. An altruistic mode, which implies a pure redistribution of the revenues among the poor swaths of the population, protracts the process of economic modernization, requires a greater amount of capital stock, and harbors a greater risk of a poverty trap. This effect is less pronounced if the modern sector is more capital‐intensive. A productive mode, which elicits full reinvestment of the commodity revenues, in contrast, accelerates the pace of economic modernization. Further, predicated on the scrutiny of a more realistic scenario, a bargaining mode, the study derives the condition for a net positive (or negative) modernization effect. The study identifies technical progress alongside capital accumulation as a further important source of economic modernization.     

Investment-Specific R and D and the Decline in the Relative Price of Capital

The relative price of capital has declined at a rapid rate in the postwar period.This article provides a candidate explanation for this relative price decline—research and development that are embodied in new, more efficient investment goods. The model mimics the secular aspects of the data, and it has the property that the long-run growth rate of consumption is nontrivially determined as a function of the R and D efforts. Because growth is driven by investment in durable goods in the present model, it seems natural to assume that R and D is product-specific and that the firms producing these goods are long-lived profit centers that internalize the dynamic gains from R and D. A result of this assumption is that the growth rate in the decentralized economy is too low: the so-called business stealing effects that may cause the equilibrium growth rate to be too high in other models is internalized here in the form of planned obsolescence.     

Oil crisis,energy-saving technological change and the stock market crash of 1973–74

The market value of U.S. corporations was nearly halved during the oil crisis of 1973–74. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the sharp rise in energy costs during this period resulted in the obsolescence of firms' existing capital and reduced their market value. To quantify this obsolescence channel of the energy crisis, we simulate a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model, where firms adopt energy-saving technologies along with the rise in energy prices, and the value of their installed capital falls due to investment irreversibility. We find that this channel can account for a third of the decline in Tobin's q observed in the data. Separately, we consider the role of investment subsidies extended by the government during this period to expedite the adoption of energy-saving technologies. This extension of the model can account for more than half of the decline in q. We also find empirical support for the capital obsolescence channel in cross-sectional regressions, where we show that the sectoral variation in the decline of energy use following the crisis is significant in explaining the sectoral variation in the drop of market values.     

The struggle to survive in the R&D sector: Implications for innovation and growth

By allowing for investment activities by research and development (R&D) firms to prevent product obsolescence, we show that if legal patent protection is too strong, a higher R&D subsidy rate delivers insufficient investments for survival in the R&D sector, depressing innovation and growth in the long run.     

Embodiment, productivity, and the age distribution of capital

An important theme in modern research on productivity has been that technological progress may be embodied in capital in the sense that traditional measures of TFP growth reflect unmeasured improvements in the quality of capital inputs as well as pure disembodied technological progress. It is commonly believed that an implication of this embodiment hypothesis is that there should be a negative relationship between measured TFP and the age of the measured capital stock. This paper presents empirical evidence which suggests that an increase in the age of the capital stock is actually associated with higher TFP growth. This surprising result may be due to the presence of a mis-measurement normally overlooked in this literature: With mis-measured improvements in capital quality, the usual depreciation rates used to construct empirical capital stocks are incorrect for growth accounting. This effect dominates the usual average age effect.     

风险资本对家族企业成长绩效的影响

基于代际传承视角,利用2006-2014年A股上市家族企业年度数据,检验风险资本对不同代际家族企业成长绩效的影响,并进一步分析这种影响在不同外部条件下是否存在差异以及存在何种差异。结果表明,风险资本对创始家族企业和后代家族企业成长绩效的影响存在显著差异,对创始家族企业成长绩效的消极作用显著低于后代家族企业。进一步检验发现,当风险资本持股比例较低、在企业扩张期与获利期进入以及企业所在地区市场成熟度较高时,风险资本对创始家族企业成长绩效的积极作用显著高于后代家族企业。     

Capital flows and economic growth revisited: evidence from five Sub-Saharan African countries

The study examines the differential effects of capital flows on economic growth in five Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period 1970–2014. Using the autoregressive distributed lag methodology, the findings show that in the long-run capital flows (i.e. foreign direct investment (FDI), aid, external debt, and remittances) have different effects on economic growth. FDI has a significant positive effect in Burkina Faso and negative effects in Gabon and Niger whereas the impact of debt is negative in all countries. Aid, however, promotes growth in Niger and Gabon whiles it deters growth in Ghana. Remittances, on the other hand, have a significant positive effect in Senegal. Finally, gross capital formation is significant in most of the countries and the impact of trade is mixed. These results suggest that the benefits of capital flows in SSA have been overemphasized.     

融资约束视角下的运营资本对中国企业全要素生产率的贡献*

金融危机后中国经济增长缓慢，产业和总需求分析框架失灵。本文从供给侧动力和非正规金融入手，研究中国企业全要素生产率与运营资本的关系。本文利用1999—2013年非上市企业的动态面板数据，采用系统GMM的方法进行回归分析，研究发现运营资本对中国企业的全要素生产率有显著的影响，而且这种影响是非线性的。但是，这种关系只在民营企业和外资企业中成立，对国有企业并不成立。本文进一步引入融资约束机制，论证了运营资本是中国非国有企业突破融资困境、促进企业全要素生产率提高的重要金融中介。       

Public Investment and Economic Growth in Latin America: an Empirical Test

The paper analyzes the impact on economic growth of public investment spending and other relevant variables (such as human capital) for nine major Latin American nations over the 1983–93 period. The results suggest that both public and private investment spending contribute to economic growth. Overall central government consumption expenditures, on the other hand, are found to have a negative effect on private investment and growth. Finally, public expenditures on education and healthcare are found to have a positive and statistically significant effect on private capital formation and long–term economic growth. From a policy standpoint, the results suggest that indiscriminate cuts in public and private investment spending are likely to be counterproductive in the long run, and more importantly, scarce public expenditures should be channeled to the promotion of new human capital (via primary and secondary education) and the maintenance of existing human capital (through healthcare expenditures).     

Economic Progress,Social Regress?

A central issue in the debate regarding the relevance of social capital is whether the decline in social embeddedness that has attended modernization over the last 40 years in the United States is as harmful as Putnam, among others, claim it to be. Critics of Putnam's thesis argue that various arms‐length institutions fulfil the roles performed by social capital thereby mitigating the negative impact of its recent decline. We develop a framework that provides insight into when such institutions may be adequate and when they might not. We find that if market (economic) and non‐market (social) interactions differ in their payoffs but are interlinked through the modernization of the economy, the optimal level of modernization in market interactions will be higher than that in non‐market interactions. Further, market supporting institutions are likely to increase the divergence between economic and social interactions since analogs for market institutions that constrain opportunistic behavior are usually nonexistent in social contexts. In this sense, economic progress may be accompanied by social regress.     

经济增长与收入分配间的相互作用机制及其实证分析——基于有约束条件的VECM

本文提出经济增长与收入分配间的相互作用机制,在这基础上利用带有两个协整的VECM对该机制进行实证.结果表明:改革开放以来我国收入分配通过降低物质资本和人力资本效力影响经济增长,且金融发展程度有助于缓解收入分配对经济增长这种的负作用;经济增长通过物质资本途径扩大收入差距,通过人力资本途径缩小收入差距.     

干中学、过度投资和R&D对人力资本积累的“侵蚀效应”

R&D的过度投资对人力资本积累具有"侵蚀效应"。本文提出了一个同时内生化技术进步和人力资本积累的经济增长模型,强调了R&D过程中的两种特征,即R&D过程需要人力资本投入和新技术的研发通过干中学获得,并就R&D对人力资本积累的"侵蚀效应"所造成的负外部性进行了分析。通过比较分散经济均衡和集中经济均衡,本文得出结论:垄断加价及其引致的物质资本和人力资本的过度投资与"侵蚀效应"相互交错、共同作用,会在一定程度上降低人力资本的积累率和经济增长率。     

Education,Innovation and Long‐Run Growth

We extend a second‐generation Schumpeterian growth model to incorporate human capital accumulation to clarify the general equilibrium effects of subsidy policies on human capital accumulation and R&D activities in a unified framework. Despite the conventional argument that subsidies always stimulate these growth‐promoting activities, we find that subsidies asymmetrically affect human capital accumulation and R&D activities. Our theoretical results suggest that research using standard models of human capital might find false negative relationships between education subsidies and economic growth.