Search Results
Journal Article
Comparing apples and oranges
Tracking prices over time is easy when the object in question doesn't change much-say, an orange. But the process is difficult when there are frequent changes in the quality of the item-say, an Apple computer. Hedonics provides the solution.
Journal Article
Cloudy with a chance of ... savings : Weather affects every sector of the economy, so there's a lot to be gained from getting the forecasts right
Related links: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2011/q4/feature5_weblinks.cfm
Journal Article
An emerging computer sector in the Tenth District
Computer industries have been an important facet of the nation's current economic expansion. During the 1990s, the computer sector has added almost three-quarters of a million jobs across the country, creating high-paying new positions and spawning new opportunities for the American entrepreneur.
Working Paper
The role of semiconductor inputs in IT hardware price decline: computers vs. communications
Sharp declines in semiconductor prices are largely responsible for observed declines in computer prices. Although communications equipment also has a large semiconductor content, communications equipment prices do not fall nearly as fast as computer prices. This paper partly resolves the puzzle-first noted by Flamm(1989)-by demonstrating that prices for chips used in communications equipment do not fall nearly as fast as prices for those chips used in computers, and those differences are large enough to potentially explain all of the output price differences.
Journal Article
Perspective: manufacturers should be liable when computer bugs leave consumers in the lurch
Auto makers are responsible for the safety and reliability of their cars. So why shouldn't software makers be held responsible for buggy computer programs?
Working Paper
Small business and computers: adoption and performance
Until recently, little evidence suggested that the computer revolution of recent decades has had much impact on aggregate economic growth. Analysis at the worker level has found evidence that use of computers is associated with higher wages. Although some research questions whether this finding is solely due to unobserved heterogeneity in worker quality, others point to such results as evidence that the wage premia for skilled workers have increased over time. Adoption of new technologies is associated with higher productivity and higher productivity growth. As in the worker literature, firms ...
Working Paper
Estimating demand elasticities in a differentiated product industry: the personal computer market
Supply and demand functions are typically estimated using uniform prices and quantities across products, but where products are heterogeneous, it is important to consider quality differences explicitly. This paper demonstrates a new approach to doing this by employing hedonic coefficients to estimate price elasticities for differentiated products in the market for personal computers. Differences among products are modeled as distances in a linear quality space derived from a multi-dimensional attribute space. Heterogeneous quality allows for the estimation of varying demand elasticities among ...
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.
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 ...