Construction of disaggregated tangible and intangible capital stocks

The project, started in 2009 after accepting a proposal by the Bank of Italy, was mainly devoted to the reconstruction of both tangible and intangible capital stocks, taking as separated all the identifiable components (buildings, machinery, equipment, patents, R&D, software, marks, advertising). The microeconomic sources of the data were the Company Accounts Data (CADS - from Centrale dei Bilanci) and the Survey of Industrial and services Firms (from the Bank of Italy). The aim was twofold: (1) to furnish the researchers of the Bank of Italy with a homogeneous data-frame for studying themes like productivity, investment, corporate capital structure; (2) to compare the patterns of investment, capital stocks and depreciation rates obtained from disaggregated (micro, at the firm level) data with those of the National Accounts (ISTAT) as far as the National Accounts report too high capital stocks. The project is still active since I am checking the uptating process of the reconstructed data done in Bank of Italy. The output of the project is composed by: a sequence of more than 100 programs, written in Stata; a manual describing all the procedures and the output; a paper of 130 pages documenting the economic and accounting relationships used in order to reconstruct the variables of interest, as well as illustrating the principal patterns of the variables and their comparison with their macro-equivalents from the National Accounts