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Journal Article
Living in an 800 MHz economy
Journal Article
Where's the productivity growth (from the information technology revolution)?
Information technology has advanced rapidly in the last two or three decades, and an equivalent rapid gain in economy-wide productivity has been anticipated. Productivity statistics, however, do not support this expectation. Although productivity growth has risen since the slowdown witnessed in the 1970s, it can hardly be described as phenomenal. Donald S. Allen discusses some of the current explanations for this apparent disparity and suggests that, as the workforce catches up to the technology level and exploits its full potential, productivity growth will increase.
Journal Article
Technological change
This Economic Letter summarizes the papers presented at the conference "Technological Change," held at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on November 14-15, 2002, under the joint sponsorship of the Bank and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The papers are listed at the end and are available online http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0211/index.html
Working Paper
Home computers and educational outcomes: evidence from the NLSY97 and CPS
Although computers are universal in the classroom, nearly twenty million children in the United States do not have computers in their homes. Surprisingly, only a few previous studies explore the role of home computers in the educational process. Home computers might be very useful for completing school assignments, but they might also represent a distraction for teenagers. We use several identification strategies and panel data from the two main U.S. datasets that include recent information on computer ownership among children--the 2000-2003 CPS Computer and Internet Use Supplements (CIUS) ...
Working 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 ...
Journal Article
Firm strategies in the personal computer market: are established brands better off?
The personal computer market underwent significant structural changes throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. While some manufacturers of personal computers managed to remain in the market for a number of years, many others left after a short time. Besides the more visible movement of firms in and out of the industry, each firm also made underlying decisions regarding which models to offer. ; This article analyzes model selection strategies adopted by personal computer (PC) companies from 1976 to 1988, focusing on differences between established and new firms. While new firms were more likely ...
Working Paper
Computers and growth with costs of adjustment: will the future look like the past?
This paper augments the traditional growth accounting framework by including a common specification of investment adjustment costs and uses the new framework to examine the past and likely future growth in nonfarm business output in the United States. The inclusion of adjustment costs can have large effects on the growth-accounting exercise when a new investment good is introduced--such as computers in the last thirty years. The new framework indicates that the contribution of computers to economic growth has been held down by the large adjustment costs required to incorporate a new ...
Journal Article
You can patent that? Are patents on computer programs and business methods good for the new economy?
In other parts of the economy, firms are increasingly turning to patents to protect not just physical inventions but more abstract ones such as computer programs or ways of doing business. Just two decades ago such patents would have been impossible to obtain, let alone enforce. In "You Can Patent That? Are Patents on Computer Programs and Business Methods Good for the New Economy?" Bob Hunt describes the changes in patent law that have given rise to this phenomenon.
Working Paper
Explaining the investment boom of the 1990s
Real equipment investment in the United States has boomed in recent years, led by soaring investment in computers. We find that traditional aggregate econometric models completely fail to capture the magnitude of this recent growth--mainly because these models neglect to address two features that are crucial (and unique) to the current investment boom. First, the pace at which firms replace depreciated capital has increased. Second, investment has been more sensitive to the cost of capital. We document that these two features stem from the special behavior of investment in computers and ...
Working Paper
Gender and the Internet
This article examines whether there are differences in men?s and women?s use of the Internet and whether any such gender gaps have changed in recent years. The authors use data from several surveys during the period 1997 to 2001 to show trends in Internet usage and to estimate regression models of Internet usage that control for individuals? socioeconomic characteristics. They find that women were significantly less likely than men to use the Internet at all in the mid-1990s, but the gender gap in usage disappeared by 2000. However, women continue to be less frequent and less intense users of ...