Charlotta Groth

Estimating UK capital adjustment costs

This paper estimates UK capital adjustment costs, using a data set for 34 industries spanning the whole UK economy for the period 1970-2000. The results show that it is costly to install new capital, and that it has been more costly to adjust the level of non-ICT capital (plant, machinery, buildings and vehicles) compared to the level of ICT capital (computers, software and telecommunications). The results are applied to an analysis of total factor productivity (TFP) growth. That analysis is focused on the 1990s - a period when the growth rate of the standard measure of TFP fell in the United Kingdom, while rising sharply in the United States. The estimates suggest that capital adjustment costs accounted for around two thirds of the observed slowdown in UK TFP growth. However, the adjustment is not large enough to reverse the finding that UK TFP growth declines in the second half of the 1990s, unlike the US experience of rising TFP growth.

Productivity Growth, Adjustment Costs and Variable Factor Utilisation: The UK Case

This paper constructs estimates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for the United Kingdom for the period 1970-2000, using an industry data set that spans the whole economy. The estimates are obtained by controlling for variable utilisation of capital and labour, and costs of adjusting these factors. The analysis is focused on the 1990s. This was a period when the growth rate of the standard measure of TFP growth for the United Kingdom, the Solow residual, did not match the sharp rise in US productivity, even though the macroeconomic environment in both countries was similar. The paper delivers two main results. First, the aggregate Solow residual underestimates TFP growth throughout the 1990s, since it does not account for falling utilisation rates and high capital adjustment costs. Second, the impact of non-technological factors on the Solow residual is similar in the first and the second half of the 1990s. This means that the broad movement in the Solow residual during the 1990s is similar to that of the estimated TFP growth. Potential reasons behind these results are discussed using disaggregated data.

Investment Adjustment Costs: Evidence from UK and US Industries

In aggregate models, costs that penalise changes in investment - investment adjustment costs - have been introduced to help account for a variety of business cycle and asset market phenomena. In this paper, we evaluate empirical evidence for these types of costs using US and UK industry data. We consider a general adjustment cost structure which nests both investment adjustment costs and the traditional capital adjustment costs as special cases. The estimated weight on the former is close to zero for all the industries. When only the investment adjustment cost structure is considered, the estimates of the adjustment cost parameter are small relative to those based on aggregate data, and imply an elasticity of investment with respect to the shadow price of capital (the value to the firm of one additional unit of capital) fifteen times larger than that found in aggregate studies. Our results suggest that from a disaggregated empirical perspective it remains difficult to motivate and interpret the investment friction considered in recent macroeconomic models.

Fundamental inflation uncertainty

We develop a method of quantifying the uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the fundamental inflation implied by the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). The uncertainty is represented as a band around the fundamental inflation, and encompasses the sampling uncertainty of both the estimates of the structural parameters and the estimates of the VAR used to form a projection of real marginal costs. An empirical application on UK and US data confirms that fundamental inflation tracks actual inflation reasonably well in both countries. For the United Kingdom the confidence band is sufficiently narrow, relative to the sample variance of inflation, to identify a number of periods where the predictions of the NKPC do not fully capture movements in actual inflation. In contrast, considerable uncertainty surrounds the estimates of fundamental inflation for the United States.