IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedmwp/636.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Expensed and sweat equity

Author

Listed:
  • Ellen R. McGrattan
  • Edward C. Prescott

Abstract

Expensed investments are expenditures financed by the owners of capital that increase future profits but, by national accounting rules, are treated as an operating expense rather than as a capital expenditure. Sweat investment is financed by worker-owners who allocate time to their business and receive compensation at less than their market rate. Such investments are made with the expectation of realizing capital gains when the business goes public or is sold. But these investments are not included in GDP. Taking into account hours spent building equity while ignoring the output introduces an error in measured productivity and distorts the picture of what is happening in the economy. In this paper, we incorporate expensed and sweat equity in an otherwise standard business cycle model. We use the model to analyze productivity in the United States during the 1990s boom. We find that expensed plus sweat investment was large during this period and critical for understanding the dramatic rise in hours and the modest growth in measured productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Ellen R. McGrattan & Edward C. Prescott, 2005. "Expensed and sweat equity," Working Papers 636, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmwp:636
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/common/pub_detail.cfm?pb_autonum_id=1036
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/WP/WP636.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert Solow, 1994. "Book Reviews," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 1(1), pages 167-171.
    2. Edward C. Prescott, 2004. "Why do Americans work so much more than Europeans?," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 28(Jul), pages 2-13.
    3. Erik Brynjolfsson & Lorin M. Hitt, 2000. "Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(4), pages 23-48, Fall.
    4. Ellen R. McGrattan & Edward C. Prescott, 2005. "Taxes, Regulations, and the Value of U.S. and U.K. Corporations," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 72(3), pages 767-796.
    5. Kevin J. Stiroh & Dale W. Jorgenson, 1999. "Information Technology and Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(2), pages 109-115, May.
    6. Ellen R. McGrattan, 2004. "Comment on Gali and Rabanal's \\"Technology shocks and aggregate fluctuations: how well does the RBC model fit postwar U.S. data?\\"," Staff Report 338, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bental, Benjamin & Demougin, Dominique, 2008. "Do factor shares reflect technology?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 30(3), pages 1329-1334, September.
    2. David Backus & Espen Henriksen & Frederic Lambert & Chris Telmer, 2005. "Current Account Fact and Fiction," 2005 Meeting Papers 115, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    3. Kyoji Fukao & Tsutomu Miyagawa & Kentaro Mukai & Yukio Shinoda & Konomi Tonogi, 2008. "Intangible Investment in Japan: New Estimates and Contribution to Economic Growth," Global COE Hi-Stat Discussion Paper Series gd08-015, Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University.
    4. Katya Kartashova, 2014. "Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(10), pages 3297-3334, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ellen R. McGrattan & Edward C. Prescott, 2010. "Unmeasured Investment and the Puzzling US Boom in the 1990s," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 2(4), pages 88-123, October.
    2. Ellen McGrattan & Edward Prescott, 2006. "Why Did U.S. Market Hours Boom in the 1990s?," NBER Working Papers 12046, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Karl Whelan, 2002. "Computers, Obsolescence, And Productivity," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 84(3), pages 445-461, August.
    4. Antonia Diaz & Maria Jose Luengo Prado, 2008. "On the User Cost and Homeownership," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 11(3), pages 584-613, July.
    5. Harald Edquist & Magnus Henrekson, 2006. "Technological Breakthroughs and Productivity Growth," Research in Economic History, in: Research in Economic History, pages 1-53, Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
    6. Razzak, Weshah, 2013. "An Empirical Study of Sectoral-Level Capital Investments in New Zealand," MPRA Paper 52461, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. David H. Autor & Frank Levy & Richard J. Murnane, 2003. "The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(4), pages 1279-1333.
    8. Grüner, Hans Peter, 2009. "Information technology: Efficient restructuring and the productivity puzzle," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 72(3), pages 916-929, December.
    9. Prescott, E.C., 2016. "RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1759-1787, Elsevier.
    10. Susanna Wolf & Shyamal Chowdhury, 2003. "Use of ICTs and the Economic Performance of SMEs in East Africa," WIDER Working Paper Series DP2003-06, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    11. Kevin J. Stiroh, 2001. "Investing in information technology: productivity payoffs for U.S. industries," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 7(Jun).
    12. Jin, Wei & Zhang, ZhongXiang, "undated". "Product Homogeneity, Knowledge Spillovers, and Innovation: Why Energy Sector is Perplexed by a Slow Pace of Technological Progress," Working Papers 249504, Australian National University, Centre for Climate Economics & Policy.
    13. Kevin J. Stiroh, 2002. "Information Technology and the U.S. Productivity Revival: What Do the Industry Data Say?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(5), pages 1559-1576, December.
    14. Roberto Motto & Massimo Rostagno & Lawrence J. Christiano, 2010. "Financial Factors in Economic Fluctuations," 2010 Meeting Papers 141, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    15. Zhang, Hongsheng & Wei, Yueling & Ma, Shuzhong, 2021. "Overcoming the “Solow paradox”: Tariff reduction and productivity growth of Chinese ICT firms," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    16. Maliranta, Mika & Rouvinen, Petri, 2003. "Productivity Effects of ICT in Finnish Business," Discussion Papers 852, The Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.
    17. James Bessen, 2002. "Technology Adoption Costs and Productivity Growth: The Transition to Information Technology," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 5(2), pages 443-469, April.
    18. Ahmed, M. Iqbal & Farah, Quazi Fidia, 2022. "On the macroeconomic effects of news about innovations of information technology," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    19. García-Muñiz, Ana Salomé & Vicente, María Rosalía, 2014. "ICT technologies in Europe: A study of technological diffusion and economic growth under network theory," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 360-370.
    20. Ferraro, Domenico & Ghazi, Soroush & Peretto, Pietro F., 2020. "Implications of tax policy for innovation and aggregate productivity growth," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 130(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Productivity;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedmwp:636. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kate Hansel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cfrbmus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.