Carol Corrado


Carol A. Corrado is an American economist who was the former chief of industrial output at the Federal Reserve Board and currently serves as a senior advisor and research director in economics on The Conference Board. She serves as a member of the executive committee for the National Bureau of Economic Research's conference on research on income and wealth. She is a senior policy scholar at Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Centre for Business and Public Policy where she focuses on economics of growth and innovation as well as fiscal and monetary policies. In addition to these positions, Corrado is involved with the American Statistical Association as well as the Technical Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the American Statistical Association Corrado serves as the chair-elect of Business and Economics.

Education

Carol Corrado attended Hershey High School in Hershey, Pennsylvania before she began her undergraduate degree in 1965 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where she received a B.S. in Management Science in 1969. After her time at Carnegie Mellon, Corrado began her PhD in 1970 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where in 1976 she obtained a PhD in Economics.

Research

Corrado's research focuses on macroeconomic issues in the United States, China, Europe and Japan. She focuses her research on intangible assets, innovation and economic growth where she has authored an extensive portfolio of papers. Much of her research addresses the changing digital economy and the role that information and communication technology has had on economic and productivity growth. Further, a large portion of her work with The Conference Board has been on the topic of the knowledge economy and the role of intangible assets in driving innovation and growth on both the microeconomic and macroeconomic level.

"Intangible Capital and U.S. Economic Growth"

Corrado's paper "Intangible Capital and U.S. Economic Growth" that she co-authored with Charles Hulten and Daniel Sichel analyzes the exclusion of intangible investment from calculated GDP and the impact it has on measured economic growth. They point out how accounting practices have lagged behind the "technological revolution" which has increased the level of intangible investment in the United States economy. Subsequently, modern accounting measures omit a large percentage of actual GDP in their calculated measure. By including intangibles in their measure Corrado, Hulten and Sichel find that over "$3 trillion of business intangible capital stock" has been left out of calculated GDP measures and lead to inaccurate representations of the United States economic growth. Since being published in 2009 Intangible Capital and U.S. Economic Growth has received considerable international recognition, winning the Kendricks Prize and being cited in Businessweek, the Economist, and the New York Times.

"Improving GDP: Demolishing, Repointing or Extending?*"

Corrado's Indigo Prize winning paper "Improving GDP: Demolishing, Repointing or Extending?*" considers the GDP measure and its validity as a measurement of the modern economy which has significantly changed since the introduction of the GDP measure. Corrado offers a modern re-evaluation of the measure proposing that it should "measure intangible and environmental capital, to quality-adjust prices, to run online experiments on willingness-to-pay for free goods" along with "extending GDP to measure economic well-being better: using some of the components of GDP such as consumption, along with leisure and measures of security" to accurately represent the transformed modern economy. She points out that the current measure is susceptible to double counting and does not account for necessary market weights which is currently measured by prices. To fix this Corrado recommends that we need to "repoint" GDP to account for prices that are "quality-adjusted" in the rapidly expanding "knowledge economy" which is experiencing a digital paradigm. The digitization of the "knowledge economy" is leading to an increase in non-market activities that are not accounted for in the current GDP measure as it strictly measures market production. Thus a reappointed GDP measure needs to redefine and reestablish the "boundary line" between non-market and market production that has become increasingly blurred by digitization.

"Innovation and intangible investment in Europe, Japan, and the United States"

"Innovation and intangible investment in Europe, Japan, and the United States" measures innovation by analyzing intangible investment and its relation with information and communication technology, spillovers, and policy. Corrado's paper examines the various perspective of innovation by providing a clear understanding of the diverse approaches to innovation. She points out that many believe innovation in EU countries is decreasing and more innovation is necessary in order to fix destabilized economies. Corrado addresses these beliefs by breaking down what exactly innovation is and how can it be measured as well as observing the role and value of policy in innovation. She finds that current measures of innovation are too ambiguous and are in need of additional measures that together form a more complete framework. She notes that innovation has largely shifted from being tangible to intangible, a reality important to consider when analyzing modern growth and innovation. As a result, she proposes a new model of measurement that takes into account intangible investment within the framework of computerized information, innovative property, and economic competencies in addition to the already measured intangibles of research and development, and software. From this measurement Corrado finds that in the United States intangible capital accounts for half of their total capital deepening where as in the EU countries it only accounts for 23.8%. Subsequently, she points out that all variables which mediate the monetization of countries investment in knowledge will be imperative factors contributing to the future growth and innovation in EU countries.

Book

In 2005 Corrado along with John Haltiwanger and Daniel Sichel released the book Measuring Capital in the New Economy. The book examines how technology has altered the U.S. economy, increasing the role of intangible assets and technology investment. They propose a variety of new approaches and necessary factors that should be included in calculations of capital in order to create more accurate measures of capital in the changing economy.
Corrado was the first place recipient of the Indigo Prize in 2017 for her work calculating the remaining GDP for the 21st century, additionally, she has received a special achievement award from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in 1998. In 2003 Corrado was awarded the Julius Shiskin award from the American Statistical Association for her statistical work regarding industrial production, capacity measurement, productivity measurement and information technology output and prices. In 2010 she was the winner of the Kendricks Prize awarded by the International Association of Research on Income and Wealth for her paper Intangible Capital and U.S. Economic Growth.