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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
Getting Smart About Phones : New Price Indexes and the Allocation of Spending Between Devices and Services Plans in Personal Consumption Expenditures
This paper addresses two measurement issues for mobile phones. First, we develop a new mobile phone price index using hedonic quality-adjusted prices for smartphones and a matched-model index for feature phones. Our index falls at an average annual rate of 17 percent during 2010-2018, close to the rate of decline in the price index used in the GDP Accounts. Given relatively flat average prices over this period, our index points to substantial quality improvement. Second, we propose a methodology to disentangle purchases of phones and wireless services when they are bundled together as part of ...