Moore's Law, Competition and Intel's Productivity in the 1990s

In the mid-1990s, a pickup in measured productivity growth for the semiconductor industry coincided with an economy-wide acceleration in labor productivity growth. The pickup in semiconductor markets reflected an increase in the growth of real output that was generated by what Dale Jorgenson (2001) called an “inflection point” in the price indexes for the semiconductor industry. Jorgenson hypothesized that the inflection point reflected increases in the rate of product innovation made possible by an increase in Moore’s Law, a stylized description of technology that currently states that the number of electrical components on a chip will double every eighteen months. Within semiconductors, microprocessors (MPUs) produced by Intel—the world’s largest producer of the chips that serve as a computer’s central processing unit—were the primary contributor to the inflection point in the semiconductor index. The inflection point in the price index coincided with two changes in the price contours for Intel’s chips. First, price contours for Intel’s chips became steeper around 1995. Because most price index formulae boil down to functions of weighted averages of price change, steeper price contours translate directly into more rapidly declining price indexes. At the same time, the product lifecycle for MPUs—the length of time chips are sold in the market—shortened and Intel began to introduce chips more frequently. What caused these changes in pricing and product cycles? This paper provides a simple framework to help gain some intuition on these issues. The model provides a set of conditions under which an increase in Moore’s Law is consistent with both of these stylized facts. In the model, an increase in Moore’s Law raises the quality of future chips relative to today’s chips. If consumers view these chips as substitutes, then increases in the quality of tomorrow’s chips push down the prices for today’s chips and can, under certain conditions, generate an inflection point in the price index. However, the framework also suggests that changes in the attributes of contemporaneous substitutes can have the same effects. Thus, the model suggests that increases in the quality of competitor’s chips can generate an inflection point through the same channel. This is an important possibility to consider because Intel faced increasing competition from AMD beginning in the mid-1990s, about when the inflection point occurred.Semiconductor Industry, Price Measurement,product cycles

Product Introductions and Price Measures for Microprocessor Chips in the 1990s

The semiconductor industry is credited with one of the fastest rates of product innovation and technical change within manufacturing, as chipmakers generate wave after wave of ever more powerful chips at prices not much higher than those of existing chips. This industry has undoubtedly been an important driver of productivity growth as advances in semiconductors paved the way for co-invention in downstream industries that, taken together, provide firms with more efficient ways to do business and the ability to provide new goods and services that ultimately increase consumer welfare. In the mid-1990s, measured productivity growth for the industry shows a pickup that coincided with an economy-wide pickup in labor productivity growth. The acceleration in the semiconductor market stems from an increase in the growth of real output that was, in turn, generated by what Jorgenson (2001) calls an “inflection point” in price indexes for the semiconductor industry. Within semiconductors, microprocessors (MPUs) produced by Intel were the primary contributor to both the trend and inflection point in this price index. This paper explores movements in the price index for MPU chips over the 1990s to better understand sources of the pickup in measured productivity growth. Three major developments in MPU markets that roughly coincided with the measured increase in productivity are reviewed: 1) the introduction of more sophisticated lithography equipment that could have allowed Intel to increase its rate of product innovation; 2) an increase in competitive pressure from AMD; and 3) a pickup in the rate of product introductions at Intel. A stylized framework for decision-making at Intel is developed and used to show that the increase in the rate of product introductions at Intel could have been a profit-maximizing response to increased competition from AMD. The model is then used to explore the implications for price measurement.Semiconductor industry, price measurement, product cycles

Changing Mix of Medical Care Services: Stylized Facts and Implications for Price Indexes

The utilization of health care services has undergone several important shifts in recent years that have implications for the cost of medical care. We empirically document the presence of these shifts for a broad list of medical conditions and assess the implications for price indexes. Following the earlier literature, we compare the growth of two price measures: one that tracks expenditures for the services actually provided to treat conditions and another that holds the mix of those services fixed over time. Using retrospective claims data for a sample of commercially-insured patients, we find that, on average, expenditures to treat diseases rose 11% from 2003:1 to 2005:4 and would have risen even faster, 18%, had the mix of services remained fixed at the 2003:1 levels. This suggests that fixed-basket price indexes, as are used in the official statistics, could overstate true price growth significantly.

Moore's Law and the Semiconductor Industry: A Vintage Model

Semiconductors, High Technology Industries,

Price Indexes for Drugs: A Review of the Issues

Price indexes provide a way to summarize changes in prices of individual goods and services using an aggregate statistic. An important use of these indexes is to decompose changes in spending into price and quantity components. Price indexes have roles in many areas, including in the National Income and Product Accounts and National Health Expenditure Accounts. Health economists have also used similar decompositions to inform policy debates about which levers may be used to contain cost growth. There are three particular issues that arise when discussing price and quality change. The first is deciding which particular formula and weights is most appropriate in constructing the index. Secondly, some price changes are accompanied by changes in the quality of goods. And lastly, price indexes for medical care do not have a clear link to patients’ welfare. Therefore, this paper focuses on the measurement issues, how the indexes are constructed, and how they may be used to decompose the growth in spending into price and quantity components.

Implications of Consumer Heterogeneity on Price Measures for Technology Goods

Using a new dataset on household purchases of personal computers (PCs), we document positive correlations between buyers' incomes and the prices they pay for seemingly identical PCs. These results suggest that ¯rms may be successful at separating the market and charging di®erent prices to consumers with di®erent levels of willingness to pay. We consider the implications of this kind of market separation for price and quality measurement via a theoretical model based on Mussa and Rosen (1978). The model suggests that, in markets like these, stan- dard methods that do not account for this heterogeneity can understate in°ation in a cost-of-living context. Consistent with the model, our empirical work shows that controlling for income yields indexes that show slower price declines than seen in standard indexes. This understatement of the cost-of-living measure likely mit- igates the unrelated upward biases found in recent studies by Bils (2009), Erickson and Pakes (2010), Broda and Weinstein (2010).

Recent changes in U.S. family finances: evidence from the 1998 and 2001 Survey of Consumer Finances

Data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances show a striking pattern of growth in family income and net worth between 1998 and 2001. Inflation-adjusted incomes of families rose broadly, although growth was fastest among the group of families whose income was higher than the median. The median value of family net worth grew faster than that of income, but as with income, the growth rates of net worth were fastest for groups above the median. The years between 1998 and 2001 also saw a rise in the proportion of families that own corporate equities either directly or indirectly (such as through mutual funds or retirement accounts); by 2001 the proportion exceeded 50 percent. The growth in the value of equity holdings helped push up financial assets as a share of total family assets despite a decline in the overall stock market that began in the second half of 2000. ; The level of debt carried by families rose over the period, but the expansion in equities and the increased values of principal residences and other assets were sufficient to reduce debt as a proportion of family assets. The typical share of family income devoted to debt repayment also fell over the period. For some groups, however--particularly those with relatively low levels of income and wealth--a concurrent rise in the frequency of late debt payments indicated that their ability to service their debts had deteriorated.Consumer behavior ; Saving and investment ; Income

The competitiveness of U.S. automobile firms : a neoclassical cost function estimation of the production costs of U.S. and Japanese firms

Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 1986.Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Economics

Measuring Health Care Costs of Individuals with Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance in the U.S.: A Comparison of Survey and Claims Data

As the core nationally representative health expenditure survey in the United States, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is increasingly being used by statistical agencies to track expenditures by disease. However, while MEPS provides a wealth of data, its small sample size precludes examination of spending on all but the most prevalent health conditions. To overcome this issue, statistical agencies have turned to other public data sources, such as Medicare and Medicaid claims data, when available. No comparable publicly available data exist for those with employer-sponsored insurance. While large proprietary claims databases may be an option, the relative accuracy of their spending estimates is not known. This study compared MEPS and MarketScan estimates of annual per person health care spending on individuals with employer-sponsored insurance coverage. Both total spending and the distribution of annual per person spending differed across the two data sources, with MEPS estimates 10 percent lower on average than estimates from MarketScan. These differences appeared to be a function of both underrepresentation of high expenditure cases and underestimation across the remaining distribution of spending.