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Journal Article
The diffusion of personal computers across the United States
For the last fifteen years or so, information technology (IT) has become an ever more important part of the U.S. economy. Looking back over the period, there can be little doubt that the growing use of IT contributed significantly to the economy's performance, especially in the latter half of the 1990s, when output grew rapidly, unemployment declined to 25-year lows, productivity surged, and the inflation rate actually fell. ; A key question about IT's role in this performance is how its use spreads or diffuses throughout the economy. This Economic Letter focuses on a particular part of this ...
Working Paper
How fast do personal computers depreciate? concepts and new estimates
This paper provides new estimates of depreciation rates for personal computers using an extensive database of prices of used PCs. Our results show that PCs lose roughly half their remaining value, on average, with each additional year of use. We decompose that decline into age-related depreciation and a revaluation effect, where the latter effect is driven by the steep ongoing drop in the constant-quality prices of newly-introduced PCs. Our results are directly applicable for measuring the depreciation of PCs in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and were incorporated into the ...
Working Paper
Prices for local area network equipment
In this paper we examine quality-adjusted prices for local area network (LAN) equipment. Hedonic regressions are used to estimate price changes for the two largest classes of LAN equipment, routers and switches. A matched model was used for LAN cards and the prices for hubs were inferred by using an economic relationship to switches. Overall, we find that prices for the four groups of LAN equipment fell at a 17 percent annual rate between 1995 and 2000. These results stand in sharp contrast to the PPI for communications equipment that is nearly flat over the 1990s.
Journal Article
The narrowing of the male-female wage gap
According to several measures, the difference in wages between men and women, the so-called "male-female wage gap" (MFWG), has shrunk substantially--by about half--over the past several decades. This phenomenon has been the subject of much research, speculation, and contention. For example, some seek to explain why the gap narrowed so dramatically in the 1980s only to narrow much more slowly in subsequent years. Others have considered the role of new technology, which may have helped level the playing field between the sexes; this view recalls the rise of office work at the turn of the ...
Working Paper
Subprime mortgage delinquency rates
We evaluate the importance of three different channels for explaining the recent performance of subprime mortgages. First, the riskiness of the subprime borrowing pool may have increased. Second, pockets of regional economic weakness may have helped push a larger proportion of subprime borrowers into delinquency. Third, for a variety of reasons, the recent history of local house price appreciation and the degree of house price deceleration may have affected delinquency rates on subprime mortgages. While we find a role for all three candidate explanations, patterns in recent house price ...
Working Paper
Labor supply and personal computer adoption.
The positive correlations found between computer use and human capital are often interpreted as evidence that the adoption of computers have raised the relative demand for skilled labor, the widely touted skill-biased technological change hypothesis. However, several models argue the skill- intensity of technology is endogenously determined by the relative supply of skilled labor. The authors use instruments for the supply of human capital coupled with a rich dataset on computer usage by businesses to show that the supply of human capital is an important determinant of the adoption of ...
Working Paper
Consumer sentiment, the economy, and the news media
The news media affects consumers' perceptions of the economy through three channels. First, the news media conveys the latest economic data and the opinions of professionals to consumers. Second, consumers receive a signal about the economy through the tone and volume of economic reporting. Last, the greater the volume of news about the economy, the greater the likelihood that consumers will update their expectations about the economy. We find evidence that all three of these channels affect consumer sentiment. We derive measures of the tone and volume of economic reporting, building upon the ...
Journal Article
Summer reading: New research in applied microeconomics - conference summary
This Economic Letter summarizes several papers presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Applied Microeconomics Summer Conference, held June 25-27, 2008. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0806/index.html ; The conference included papers on a number of topics, including analyses of the impacts of government programs and insights into the behavior of businesses. All the papers shared a common approach of applying detailed, microeconomic data to understand behavior and to distinguish causation from correlation.
Journal Article
The outlook for productivity growth: symposium summary
This Economic Letter summarizes several papers presented at the symposium "The Outlook for Future Productivity Growth" hosted November 14, 2008, by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Center for the Study of Innovation and Productivity (CSIP). The papers are listed at the end and most are available online.
Working Paper
Understanding productivity: lessons from longitudinal microdata
This paper reviews research that uses longitudinal microdata to document productivity movements and to examine factors behind productivity growth. The research explores the dispersion of productivity across firms and establishments, the persistence of productivity differentials, the consequences of entry and exit, and the contribution of resource reallocation across firms to aggregate productivity growth. The research also reveals important factors correlated with productivity growth, such as managerial ability, technology use, human capital, and regulation. The more advanced literature in ...