Search Results
Journal Article
Information technology and productivity: where are we now and where are we going?
Productivity growth in the U.S. economy jumped during the second half of the 1990s, a resurgence that many analysts linked to developments in information technology (IT). However, shortly after this consensus emerged, demand for IT products fell sharply, leading to a debate about the connection between IT and productivity and about the sustainability of the faster growth. ; This article contributes to this debate in two ways. First, the authors provide updated estimates of the proximate sources of growth using a growth accounting framework that focuses on information technology. Their results ...
Journal Article
Is there a bank lending channel for monetary policy?
Using data for the U.S. manufacturing sector, we investigate the existence of a credit channel for monetary policy that operates through bank lending. Our test is based on the behavior of the mix of bank and nonbank debt after a shift in monetary policy. We allow for a differential response to monetary policy of the debt mix for small firms and large firms, and we account for movements in all major types of nonbank debt (including trade credit and long-term debt). In contrast to earlier work, we find no support for a bank lending channel.
Journal Article
Is there a broad credit channel for monetary policy?
Using data for the U.S. manufacturing sector, we test for the existence of a broad credit channel for monetary policy, which operates through the total supply of loans. Our test focuses on the relationship between internal funds and business investment. After a monetary tightening, we find that this relationship becomes much closer for small firms but not for large firms. In contrast, after a monetary easing, the relationship is little changed for all firms. This evidence supports the existence of a broad credit channel.
Conference Paper
The resurgence of growth in the late 1990s: is information technology the story?
The performance of the U.S. economy over the past several years has been remarkable, including a rebound in labor productivity growth after nearly a quarter century of sluggish gains. To assess the role of information technology in the recent rebound, this paper re-examines the growth contribution of computers and related inputs with the same neoclassical framework that we have used in earlier work. ; Our results indicate that the contribution to productivity growth from the use of information technology - including computer hardware, software, and communication equipment - surged in the ...
Working Paper
How Fast Do Personal Computers Depreciate? Concepts and New Estimates
This paper provides new estimates of depreciation rates for personal computers (PCs) using an extensive database on 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 (NIPA) and were incorporated into ...
Working Paper
Commercial and residential land prices across the United States
We use a national dataset of land sales to construct land price indexes for 23 MSAs in the United States and for the aggregate of those MSAs. We construct the price indexes by estimating hedonic regressions with a large sample of land transactions dating back to the mid-1990s. The regressions feature a flexible method of controlling for spatial price patterns within an MSA. The resulting price indexes show a dramatic increase in both commercial and residential land prices over several years prior to their peak in 2006-07 and a steep descent since then. These fluctuations in land prices are ...
Working Paper
Information technology and productivity: where are we now and where are we going?
Productivity growth in the U.S. economy jumped during the second half of the 1990s, a resurgence that many analysts linked to information technology (IT). However, shortly after this consensus emerged, demand for IT products fell sharply, leading to a lively debate about the connection between IT and productivity and about the sustainability of the faster growth. We contribute to this debate in two ways. First, to assess the robustness of the earlier evidence, we extend the growth-accounting results in Oliner and Sichel (2000a) through 2001. The new results confirm the basic story in our ...
Working Paper
Investment behavior, observable expectations, and internal funds
We use earnings forecasts from securities analysts to construct more accurate measures of the fundamentals that affect the expected returns to investment. We find that investment responds significantly -- in both economic and statistical terms -- to our new measures of fundamentals. Our estimates imply that the elasticity of the investment-capital ratio with respect to a change in fundamentals is generally greater than unity. In addition, we find that internal funds are uncorrelated with investment spending, even for selected subsamples of firms -- those paying no dividends and those without ...
Working Paper
Is the information technology revolution over?
Given the slowdown in labor productivity growth in the mid-2000s, some have argued that the boost to labor productivity from IT may have run its course. This paper contributes three types of evidence to this debate. First, we show that since 2004, IT has continued to make a significant contribution to labor productivity growth in the United States, though it is no longer providing the boost it did during the productivity resurgence from 1995 to 2004. Second, we present evidence that semiconductor technology, a key ingredient of the IT revolution, has continued to advance at a rapid pace and ...
Working Paper
Is there a bank credit channel for monetary policy?