Vintage technologies and the theory of the firm

Abstract

The disaggregation of the capital stock by year of construction, that is the most important characteristic of vintage production models, offers a number of conceptual advantages over models with a homogeneous capital stock. These advantages relate e.g. to the embodiment of technical progress in new capital goods, the incorporation of a distinction between substitution possibilities before and after installation of a capital good, or the scrapping of obsolete capital on economic, rather than technical, grounds. The survey in chapter 2.3.2 discusses a number of empirical studies that have attempted to exploit these advantages in the modelling of investment- or employment decisions. Despite this increasing popularity of vintage technologies in empirical work, relatively little attention has been paid to the choice-theoretic foundations of these models, compared to the research efforts devoted to the theory of the firm with the standard neoclassical production functions. As pointed out in chapter 2.3.2, the empirical models used in the literature are not always compatible with full profit maximization and in any case consider only part of the decision problem of the entrepreneur, in contrast to the multi-factor models developed for standard production technologies.