Intangible Assets: Computers and Organizational Capital

In developed economies, production requires not only such traditional factors as capital and labor but also skills, organizational structures and processes, culture, and other factors collectively referred to as “intangible assets. ” Detailed investigation of some of these types of assets has found that they are often large in magnitude and have important productivity benefits. For example, Dale Jorgenson and Barbara Fraumeni found that the stock of human capital in the U.S. economy dwarfs that of physical capital and has grown over time.1 Bronwyn Hall, Zvi Griliches, and Baruch Lev and Theodore Sougiannis found evidence that research and development (R&D) assets bring benefits in the form of positive…