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Discussion Paper
Own-Account IT Equipment Investment
This note considers a puzzle: why has information technology (IT) equipment investment in the National income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) been so weak since 2007 at the same time that financial reports indicate massive increases in capital expenditures by IT service companies?
Working Paper
Prices for Communications Equipment: Rewriting the Record
Communication equipment plays as large a role in high-tech investment as computers, yet prices for communication equipment have not been studied as extensively as prices for computers and electronic components. Prices for satellites, cell phones, and the ground stations for these systems--important components of a nation's communications infrastructure--are difficult to locate in official statistics. This paper develops new price measures for 16 types of communications equipment from 1963 to 2009. Indexes for some (e.g., cellular phone systems) experience declines of 15-20 percent per year, ...
Working Paper
ICT Services and their Prices: What do they tell us about Productivity and Technology?
This paper reassesses the link between ICT prices, technology, and productivity. To understand how the ICT sector could come to the rescue of a whole economy, we extend a multi-sector model due to Oulton (2012) to include ICT services (e.g., cloud services) and use it to calibrate the steady-state contribution of the ICT sector to growth in aggregate U.S. labor productivity. Because ICT technologies diffuse through the economy increasingly via purchases of cloud and data analytic services that are not fully accounted for in the standard narrative on ICT's contribution to economic growth, the ...
Journal Article
Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2002 historical and annual revision
In late 2002, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published a revision to its index of industrial production and the related measures of capacity utilization. The primary feature of the revision was the reclassification back to 1972 of production and capacity indexes for individual industries from the Standard Industrial Classification System to the North American Industry Classification System. The revision also reflects the incorporation of newly available, more comprehensive source data, and it introduced improved methods for measuring the annual real output of ...
Discussion Paper
Decomposition of productivity and unit costs