Macroeconomic Implications of Investment-Specific Technological Change

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A quantitative investigation of investment-specific technological change for the U.S. postwar period is undertaken, analyzing both long-term growth and business cycles within the same framework. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change, and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional Hicks-neutral form of technological progress. The balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to U.S. National Income and Product Account data. The long- and short-run U.S. data are then interpreted through the eyes of this framework. The analysis suggests that investment-specific change accounts for a large part of U.S. growth and is a significant factor in U.S. business cycle fluctuations.

Published as "Long-Run Implications of Investment-Specific Technological Change" in: The American Economic Review (Vol. 87, No. 3, June 1997, pp. 342-362).