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Working Paper
Why are semiconductor prices falling so fast? Industry estimates and implications for productivity measurement
By any measure, price deflators for semiconductors fell at a staggering pace over much of the last decade. These rapid declines are typically attributed to technological innovations that lower constant-quality manufacturing costs. But, given Intel's dominance in the microprocessor market, those price declines may also reflect changes in Intel's profit margins. Disaggregate data on Intel's operations are used to explore these issues. There are three basic findings. First, the industry data show that Intel's markups from its microprocessor segment shrank substantially from 1993-99. Second, ...
Journal Article
The product life cycle and the electronic components industry
Working Paper
The value of knowledge spillovers
This paper aims at quantifying the economic value of knowledge spillovers by exploring information contained in patent citations. We estimate a market valuation equation for semiconductor firms during the 1980s and 1990s, and find an average value in the amount of $0.6 to 1.2 million "R&D-equivalent" dollars for the knowledge spillovers as embodied in one patent citation. For an average semiconductor firm, such an estimate implies that the total value of knowledge spillovers the firm received during the sample period could be as high as half of its actual total R&D expenditures in the same ...
Journal Article
Changing geographical patterns of electronic components activity
Journal Article
Semiconductor Industrial Policy and the Fifth District
Chatham County, N.C., is a long way from Silicon Valley. Around 76,000 residents live here among the rolling hills of the Piedmont region, nestled between the Atlantic Plain and the Appalachian Mountains. Farming and mining have been the primary industries for generations. The county is about 2,700 miles away from Silicon Valley, the Bay Area region widely acknowledged as the world's semiconductor innovation hub for over half a century. But despite these differences in geography and reputation, in September 2022, Wolfspeed, a firm originally founded in North Carolina in 1987 as a developer ...
Journal Article
The semiconductor industry
Monograph
Industry clusters in Texas
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
Price measures for semiconductor devices
This note provides quality-adjusted price indexes and nominal shipments data for highly disaggregate classes of semiconductor devices. These data may be used to construct indexes under different assumptions from those used in indexes that are currently available. Because the construction of these building blocks require some assumptions, the indexes are compared with similar price measures constructed by Bruce Grimm (1998) and by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Journal Article
Competition in the semiconductor industry