We compute quality-adjusted price indexes for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) for the period 1999-2004, using data on prices and characteristics of 203 models sold by 12 manufacturers. The PDA market is growing in size, it is technologically dynamic with very substantial changes in measured...

Explanations of procyclical productivity play a key role in a variety of business-cycle models. Most of these models, however, explain this procyclicality within a representative-firm paradigm. This procedure is misleading. We decompose aggregate productivity changes into several terms, each of...

Using data on gross output for two-digit manufacturing industries, we find that an increase in the output of one manufacturing sector has little or no significant effect on the productivity of other sectors. Using value-added data, however, we confirm the results of previous studies which find...

This paper aims to examine the productivity change of the Japanese economy using the data pertaining to the 47 prefectures during the period 1981-2000. The decomposition analysis of the Hicks-Moorsteen-Bjurek productivity index is conducted to explore the sources of the productivity change. In...

This paper presents an econometric mediation analysis. It considers identification of production functions and the sources of output effects (treatment effects) from experimental interventions when some inputs are mismeasured and others are entirely omitted.

Using pooled cross-section, time-series data for 44 industries over the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in the United States, I find no econometric evidence that computer investment is positively linked to TFP growth (over and above its inclusion in the TFP measure). However,...

Measuring the private returns to R&D requires knowledge of its private depreciation or obsolescence rate, which is inherently variable and responds to competitive pressure. Nevertheless, most of the previous literature has used a constant depreciation rate to construct R&D capital stocks and...

Italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their European competitors. This paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms' productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor...

We estimate the volatility of plant-level idiosyncratic shocks in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Our measure of volatility is the variation in Revenue Total Factor Productivity which is not explained by either industry- or economy-wide factors, or by establishments' characteristics. Consistent...

Innovation in SMEs exhibits some peculiar features that most traditional indicators of innovation activity do not capture. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a structural model of innovation which incorporates information on innovation success from firm surveys along with the usual R&D...