About this event
In this paper we chart technological progress embodied in capital equipment used in production. To do this, we digitize archival statutory filings of 85 million transactions of capital equipment, across five large US States. These data begin in the 1990s and are updated in real time. We link these transactions to firms' establishments and augment each transaction with a rich textual description of equipment-capabilities, using a generative AI / LLM trained for this purpose. These data elucidate a number of new facts about the adoption and diffusion of capital equipment used in production. Chief among these facts is the strikingly uneven distribution of frontier capital equipment, with some industries/counties using equipment which is over 20 years behind their peers. We plan to utilise these data to study a number of tax policy shocks aimed at spurring investment, including “bonus depreciation” schemes, which were differentially imposed across US States. We propose a difference-in-difference design which leverages our highly granular and novel data product, to understand how tax policy impacts business investment and capital upgrading.
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