CAPITAL RESALABILITY / LIQUIDITY MEASURE

The measure of Capital resalability  or capital liquidity or the extent of non-sunkenness of capital investment used in our paper is the "share of used capital in aggregate industry capital expenditure."

More specifically, to compute the proposed index of capital liquidity, we obtained data on used as well as new capital expenditure at the industry level from public use datasets at the U.S. Census Bureau, for the Census years 1987 and 1992. The ASM and economic census questionnaires collect detailed information on capital expenditures from the respondents. Specifically, establishments are asked to report total capital expenditure, as well as a split of the expenditure between new capital investment and used capital investment. Our index is defined simply as the ratio of used capital expenditure to total capital expenditure.

The data (by 4-digit SIC1987 code) is available as a zipped Stata file here: Capital Resalability/Liquidity data

If you use the data, we request you cite our paper:

Balasubramanian, Natarajan, and Jagadeesh Sivadasan, "Capital Resalability, Productivity Dispersion and Market Structure,"  Review of Economics and Statistics, Volume: 91   Issue: 3   August 2009,  Pages: 547-557