Household Innovation and R&D: Bigger than You Think
Name
Review of Income and Wealth - 2020 - Sichel - Household Innovation and R D Bigger than You Think.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
325.59 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8004ef5726d2e6a626cebb857a9507a9
Author(s)
Sichel, Daniel
Hippel, Eric
Date Issued
2020
Journal
Review of Income and Wealth
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Sichel, Daniel and Hippel, Eric. 2020. "Household Innovation and R&D: Bigger than You Think." Review of Income and Wealth, 67 (3).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association for Research in Income and Wealth Despite recent interest in measuring household activities, investment in household R&D (or household innovation), has not been considered in any of the literatures on national-accounts-style measurement. Household R&D is the dedication of household resources to creating a product or process that will generate a service flow in the future; that is a household intangible asset. This paper takes a step toward valuing household innovation in the U.S. by developing time series of nominal and real investment and capital stocks for household R&D. We find that household investment in R&D was more than 11 percent of R&D funded by the private business sector in 2017 and about half of what businesses spent on R&D to develop new products for consumers. If household R&D were judged to be in scope for GDP, GDP would have been 0.2 percent higher in 2017. We conclude that household R&D is important and warrants closer attention.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/ROIW.12477
