Nakamura, L. (2022). Deflating Intangible Investment: Some new ideas and estimates.

This article discusses the ways in which intangible investments differ from tangible investments, particularly for explaining output growth and messuring factor productivity. The article then proceed to a discussion of how we currently deflate intangibles.

The paper shows that some areas of research and development have achieved large improvements in their technology, and raises the question of whether intangible investments are deflating rapidly – as some tangible investments, such as computers, have in the past.

This articles builds upon results in Nakamura (2020) to provide examples to illustrate measurement methods and issues and to provide some very crude estimates of the impact of implementing these on the growth rate of US investment output and inflation.

See the paper here.