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Working Paper
Is there a bank credit channel for monetary policy?
Working Paper
Shifting trends in semiconductor prices and the pace of technological progress
This paper examines three questions motivated by previous research on semiconductors and productivity growth: Why did semiconductor prices fall so rapidly in the second half of the 1990s, why has the rate of price decline slowed since 2001, and to what extent are these price swings associated with changes in the rate of advance in semiconductor technology? We show that the price swings are statistically significant and that they reflect changes in both price-cost markups and cost trends. Further analysis indicates that the shift to faster cost declines in the mid-1990s likely corresponded to ...
Working Paper
Time-to plan lags for commercial construction projects
We use a large project-level dataset to estimate the length of the planning period for commercial construction projects in the United States. We find that these time-to-plan lags are long, averaging about 17 months when we aggregate the projects without regard to size and more than 28 months when we weight the projects by their construction cost. The full distribution of time-to-plan lags is very wide, and we relate this variation to the characteristics of the project and its location. In addition, we show that time-to-plan lags lengthened by 3 to 4 months, on average, over our sample period ...
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 are Semiconductor Prices Falling?
The Producer Price Index (PPI) for the United States suggests that semiconductor prices have barely been falling in recent years, a dramatic contrast to the rapid declines reported from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. This slowdown in the rate of decline is puzzling in light of evidence that the performance of microprocessor units (MPUs) has continued to improve at a rapid pace. Over the course of the 2000s, the MPU prices posted by Intel, the dominant producer of MPUs, became much stickier over the chips' life cycle. As a result of this change, we argue that the matched-model methodology ...
Working Paper
Reassessing the social returns to equipment investment
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 ...
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 ...