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Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century

Measuring innovation is a challenging task, both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growth in importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and on prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to and data sources for measurement, such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm and using trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business start-ups and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, including developing more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space and expanding the measurement of innovation’s impacts on GDP in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing. 

Reviews

"For those of us interested in the need to measure better—which means understanding better—the increasingly intangible economy, this is a really interesting book. It covers the waterfront from conceptual frameworks down to nitty gritty measurement questions."

Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist

"Despite their wide range, the essays in this book add up to a fascinating glimpse of an emerging new understanding of the twenty-first century economy, like a distant building taking shape as you approach it on a foggy day. They also underline the importance of research on statistics describing the economy. . . . A valuable contribution to the task of understanding the world  innovation is creating."

Business Economics

Table of Contents

Prefatory Note
Introduction
Carol Corrado, Jonathan Haskel, Javier Miranda, and Daniel Sichel
 
I. Expanding Current Measurement Frameworks
1. Expanded GDP for Welfare Measurement in the Twenty-First Century
Charles Hulten and Leonard I. Nakamura
2. Measuring the Impact of Household Innovation Using Administrative Data
Javier Miranda and Nikolas Zolas
3. Innovation, Productivity Dispersion, and Productivity Growth
Lucia Foster, Cheryl Grim, John C. Haltiwanger, and Zoltan Wolf
 
II. New Approaches and Data
4. How Innovative Are Innovations? A Multidimensional, Survey-Based Approach
Wesley M. Cohen, You-Na Lee, and John P. Walsh
5. An Anatomy of US Firms Seeking Trademark Registration
Emin M. Dinlersoz, Nathan Goldschlag, Amanda Myers, and Nikolas Zolas
6. Research Experience as Human Capital in New Business Outcomes
Nathan Goldschlag, Ron Jarmin, Julia Lane, and Nikolas Zolas
 
III. Changing Structure of the Economy
7. Measuring the Gig Economy: Current Knowledge and Open Issues
Katharine G. Abraham, John C. Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James R. Spletzer
8. Information and Communications Technology, R&D, and Organizational Innovation: Exploring Complementarities in Investment and Production
Pierre Mohnen, Michael Polder, and George van Leeuwen
9. Digital Innovation and the Distribution of Income
Dominique Guellec
 
IV. Improving Current Measurement Frameworks
10. Factor Incomes in Global Value Chains: The Role of Intangibles
Wen Chen, Bart Los, and Marcel P. Timmer
11. Measuring Moore’s Law: Evidence from Price, Cost, and Quality Indexes
Kenneth Flamm
12. Accounting for Innovations in Consumer Digital Services: IT Still Matters
David Byrne and Carol Corrado
13. The Rise of Cloud Computing: Minding Your Ps, Qs, and Ks
David Byrne, Carol Corrado, and Daniel Sichel
14. BEA Deflators for Information and Communications Technology Goods and Services: Historical Analysis and Future Plans
Erich H. Strassner and David B. Wasshausen
 
Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index

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