From an engineering perspective, a capital good’s service is energy conversion - e.g., the physical 'work' done by a machine - and can thus be measured directly by the energy consumed in production. We show important empirical advantages of our concept over traditional measures. The empirical...

We study whether technology gains in sectors related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) increase productivity in the rest of the economy. To separate exogenous gains in ICT from other technological progress, we use the relative price of ICT goods and services in a structural VAR...

A strong state sector can act as an adverse factor shock in a relatively fixed factor supply environment. Low factor mobility across regions makes China an ideal setting to study this factor supply channel. We find that a strong local SOE presence has a substantial adverse growth effect on local...

We provide broad-based evidence of a firm size premium of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Europe after the Global Financial Crisis. The TFP growth of smaller firms was more adversely affected and diverged from their larger counterparts after the crisis. The impact was progressively...

This paper reassesses the link between ICT prices, technology, and productivity. To understand how the ICT sector could come to the rescue of a whole economy, we extend a multi-sector model due to Oulton (2012) to include ICT services (e.g., cloud services) and use it to calibrate the...

This paper compares the productivity growth of a set of Canadian and U.S. regulated industries. Using data from Statistics Canada's KLEMS database and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the paper examines productivity growth in transportation services (which includes air and rail),...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...

Official data from statistical agencies are not always ideal for cross-country comparisons because of differences in data sources and methodology. Analysts who engage in cross-country comparisons need to carefully choose among alternatives and sometimes adapt data especially for their purposes....

This paper examines the effects of alternative specifications of the user costs of capital on the estimated price and volume indices of capital services. It asks how sensitive the results are to the use of exogenous versus endogenous rates of return, to alternate ways of including capital gains,...

This paper employs the databases that are used to construct Statistics Canada's Productivity Accounts to examine the sources of growth in the Canadian economy and the history of productivity growth in Canada over the period 1961 to 2002. It makes use of a new time series using the North American...