Erschienen:
Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2013
Erschienen in:NBER working paper series ; no. w19507
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.3386/w19507
Identifikator:
Reproduktionsnotiz:
Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Mode of access: World Wide Web
System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
Beschreibung:
Researchers have long hypothesized that spillovers from government, university, and private company R&D contribute to economic growth, but these contributions may be difficult to measure when they take a non-pecuniary form. The growth of networking devices and the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s magnified these challenges, as illustrated by the deployment of the descendent of the NCSA HTTPd server, otherwise known as Apache. This study asks whether this experience could produce measurement issues in standard productivity analysis, specifically, omission and attribution issues, and, if so, whether the magnitude is large enough to matter. The study develops and analyzes a novel data set consisting of a 1% sample of all outward-facing web servers used in the United States. We find that use of Apache potentially accounts for a mismeasurement of somewhere between $2 billion and $12 billion, which equates to between1.3 percent and 8.7 percent of the stock of prepackaged software in private fixed investment in the United States. We argue that these findings point to a large potential undercounting of the rate or return from IT spillovers from the invention of the Internet, and to a large potential undercounting of "digital dark matter" in general