This paper documents how plant-level wages, occupational mix, workforce education, and productivity vary with the adoption and use of new factory automation technologies, such as programmable controllers, computer-automated design, and numerically controlled machines. The authors'...

This paper reviews research that uses longitudinal microdata to document productivity movements and to examine factors behind productivity growth. The research explores the dispersion of productivity across firms and establishments, the persistence of productivity differentials, the consequences...

The news media affects consumers' perceptions of the economy through three channels. First, the news media conveys the latest economic data and the opinions of professionals to consumers. Second, consumers receive a signal about the economy through the tone and volume of economic reporting....

The news media affects consumers' perceptions of the economy through three channels. First, the news media conveys economic data and the opinions of professionals to consumers. Second, consumers receive a signal about the economy through the tone and volume of economic reporting. Last, when the...

This paper examines the relationship between the use of advanced technologies and productivity and productivity growth rates. We use data from the 1993 and 1988 Survey of Manufacturing Technology (SMT) to examine the use of advanced (computer based) technologies at two different points in time....

The news media affects consumers' perceptions of the economy through three channels. First, the news media conveys economic data and the opinions of professionals to consumers. Second, consumers receive a signal about the economy through the tone and volume of economic reporting. Last, when the...

This paper examines the prices for communications equipment, an important component of information technology. Unlike prices for computers which officially fall sharply every year, the official prices for communications equipment have barely budged over the past decade. This paper combines...

Hedonic techniques were developed to control for quality differences across goods and over time in order to construct constant-quality aggregate price measures. When the available data are a panel of high-frequency data on models whose characteristics are constant over time, matched-model price...

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...