Natural disasters can cause substantial damage to public and private sector infrastructure capital, generating macroeconomic losses through complex channels. These shocks must be managed and accounted for with macrofiscal and monetary policy to minimize their welfare impacts. To support this...

The recent debates on infrastructure spending have led to renewed interest in the measurement of infrastructure and its effects on growth and well-being. This paper updates estimates of one important type of infrastructure capital—highways and streets. We compare BEA's capital measures with...

This paper builds on a previous paper by the authors (Kornfeld and Fraumeni, 2022) that primarily used U.S. Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics data to disaggregate investment in highways and streets into more detailed types to produce updated estimates of net wealth stocks and...

This research paper investigates interactions of human capital, capital goods import and economic growth with a panel of 13 West African countries comprises of 7 low income and 6 low-middle income countries over the period of 1980-2018. The study adopts the Panel Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag...

We develop an analytically tractable model of optimal financing policies for a risk averse decision maker who is exposed to climate risk causing a significant disruption to capital stock accumulation. We quantitatively identify certain thresholds of cash-capital ratio explicitly characterizing...

Digitalisation has become one of the core concepts in European modernisation. Whileinvestment in computer hardware, telecommunications equipment, software and databaseshas increased over the years, the degree of modernity of the overall capital stock has not.This paper examines whether there is...

Most studies of total factor productivity (TFP) and long-term production functions use capital stock time series obtained from ad hoc estimates of the rate of depreciation and the initial capital stock. This paper introduces a methodology that allows the simultaneous econometric estimation of...

We pose the problem of managing the interstate as an optimal capital stock problem and define user cost as the charge per vehicle mile travelled that rationalizes observed investments in lane miles and pavement quality. We find that user cost is the sum of the opportunity cost of lane miles,...

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term capitalism refers to: “The possession of capital or wealth; an economic system in which private capital or wealth is used in the production or distribution of goods and prices are determined mainly in a free market; the dominance of private...

When considering that increasing CO2 emissions are one of the most important reasons for global warming, the prospect for energy transition emerges as a significant way to combat this issue. Although there is a high correlation between CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption, nonrenewable...

This work is an analysis of the Economocracy and Representative Economocracy. A reformed economic system is required for the transformation of global grown debt to sustainable levels. The challenge to avoid economic worldwide deadlock yields the emerging need for economocracy as a premium...

The effects that the Latin America and Caribbean capital stock (public and private) had on the income inequality levels of 18 countries from this region were analyzed, over a period ranging from 1995 to 2017, recurring to an autoregressive distributed lag model in the form of an unrestricted...

This paper studies the effects of human and physical capital income taxation on growth, and examines how these effects depend on the technologies for human capital accumulation and 'leisure'. It then derives the normative implications of the analysis for the optimal taxation of factor incomes....

In the year that capital-poor countries open their stock markets to foreign investors, the growth rate of their typical firm's capital stock exceeds its pre-liberalization mean by 4.1 percentage points. In each of the next three years the average growth rate of the capital stock for the 369...

Greece's investment rate plunged following the Sovereign Debt Crisis (SDC) and remained one of the lowest in the world in 2019. This paper explores recent investment dynamics and compares them against estimated benchmarks. Our results suggest that Greece has been under-investing since the SDC,...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of estimating distributed lags in short panels. Estimates of the parameter of distributed lag relationships based on single time-series of observations have been usually rather imprecise. The promise of panel data is in the N repetitions of the...

Numerous studies on production and cost, the sources of productivity and studies on endogenous growth have recognized the pivotal role of the physical capital stock. Also there is a clear recognition by economists and policy makers that knowledge capital approximated by R&D capital is crucial...

This article examines how the availability of annuities affects savings and inequality in economies in which neither private nor public pensions initially exist. The absence of widespread market or government annuity insurance is clearly descriptive of many less developed countries in the world...

The purpose of the present study is to measure the extent to which an increase in the total capital stock induces an increase in the stock of residential capital, i.e., to measure the marginal propensity of additional capital to be absorbed in residential capital. A knowledge of this propensity...

This paper -- prepared for and presented at a meeting of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth -- describes a set of seven capital stock estimates for the U.S., distributed at decennial intervals, 1840 through 1900.The estimates link with Raymond Goldsmith's work on the twentieth...

The age structure of capital plays an important role in the measurement of productivity. It has been argued that the slowdown in the 1970's can be ascribed to the aging of the stock of capital. In this paper we incorporate the age structure in productivity measurement. A proposition proves that...

Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question "how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

This paper examines the effects of taxation of human capital, physical capital and foreign assets in a multi-sector model of endogenous growth. It is shown that in general the growth rate is reduced by taxes on capital and labor (human capital) income. When the government faces no borrowing...

This paper develops a tractable stochastic overlapping generations model to analyze the equilibrium equity premium and growth rate of the capital stock in the presence of a defined-benefit Social Security system. If the Social Security Trust Fund increases the share of its portfolio held in...

This paper provides an overview of the currently available evidence on the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for developments in productivity growth in the euro area. On the basis of the available data, there is evidence of an increased contribution of ICT to...

We investigate heterogeneity between foreign direct investment (FDI) and domestic investment induced by corruption and human capital. Controlling for corruption and human capital, inbound FDI has significant, heterogeneous complementarity effects on domestic investment; the effect of outbound...

A recent literature has explored the role of semi-autonomous demand growth. This paper builds on the literature by incorporating a Lernerian government semi-autonomous demand function and an endogenous supply-side. Our main purpose is threefold. First, we wish to contribute to the case for...

We consider the regulation of national firms in a common market. Regulators can influence the production of national firms but they incur in a positive cost of public funds. First, we show that market integration is welfare improving if and only if the efficiency gains compensate for the...

This paper takes a fresh look at the analysis of labour market dynamics and argues that capital accumulation plays a fundamental role in shaping unemployment movements. This role has generally been examined by considering indirect transmission channels of the capital stock effects, i.e. using...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...