The Workweek of Capital and Capital Utilization in Manufacturing

Abstract

Over the typical intervals of time studied in economic analysis, the flow of capital services is not a fixed proportion of the capital stock. Much of the short-run variation in capital services comes from the duration of operations. This paper presents new estimates of the workweek of capital from the Census Bureau' Survey of Plant Capacity (SPC), both for our own analytical use and to make workweek data more widely available to other researchers. The paper uses these workweek estimates to reconsider various results in the literature on capital utilization and productivity growth.