Solow Residual
The Solow residual is the portion of output growth that is not explained by the growth of measured inputs — capital and labour — after each input's growth is weighted by its share of national income. Introduced by Robert Solow in 1957, it is the empirical counterpart of total factor productivity (TFP) growth and is computed by subtraction rather than measured directly. Because it captures everything that raises output without raising measured inputs, it has been famously described as a 'measure of our ignorance': it labels what we cannot otherwise account for, lumping together genuine technical change, efficiency gains, and pure measurement error.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Solow, R. M. (1957). Technical change and the aggregate production function. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 39(3), 312–320. · DOI 10.2307/1926047
- Jorgenson, D. W., & Griliches, Z. (1967). The explanation of productivity change. The Review of Economic Studies, 34(3), 249–283. · DOI 10.2307/2296675
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.