Dave Byrne

The primary focus of my research is information technology innovation and its effects on economic growth and the organization of economic activity. If you're working in this area, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Most of my work has been directed toward improving measurement of the production and use of IT. Existing data does not support serious analysis of the life cycle of IT innovation, its effect on productivity growth, and the changing structure of the tech sector supply chain. Targeted improvements to measurement of production, investment, consumption, and depreciation have been effective, but insufficient. I'm focused on building a database covering stocks and flows for all stages of the global electronics industrial sector with cross-country, time-series, and cross-product consistency, ensured by a common approach to measurement.

I give a twenty minute overview of these issues in this video

Dave Byrne

gmail: research.dave.byrne

Work in progress

Innovation and Productivity The IT innovation process and the path from innovation to productivity.

AI, Productivity, Labor Markets, and Institutional Context (with Martin Baily)

Industrial Organization and Geography Location of the stages of the electronics supply chain and the boundaries of firms and establishments.

Where's Qualcomm? The Hidden U.S. Semiconductor Industry

Industrial Policy The effects of interventions on innovation, productivity, and location.

The Big Chill: U.S. Trade Policy and the Chinese Role in the Global Electronics Sector (with Jaedo Choi and Younghun Shim)

Economic Measurement Capturing the real value of IT production, investment, consumption, depreciation, and assets with a focus on mutual consistency across flows and stocks, over time, across countries, and across products.

Transistors all the way Down: Viability of Direct Volume Measurement (and Price Indexes) for Semiconductors (with Adrian Hamins-Puertolas and Molly Harnish)

Slides

Car Phone, Bag Phone, Flip Phone, Brick Phone (with Isabel Leigh)
COVID-19 and Digital Consumption (with Carol Corrado)

Papers

Broad Scope

The Digital Economy and ProductivityOverview of the digital economy, its role in aggregate productivity, and measurement challenges that interfere with analysis.
Is the IT Revolution Over?Assessment of the prospects---as of 2013---for a revival of rapid productivity growth boosted by IT. (with Dan Sichel and Steve Oliner)
Does the United States have a Productivity Slowdown or a Measurement Problem?. Assessment of the contribution of measurement problems---those quantifiable as of 2016---to the reported productivity slowdown since the boom that began in the 1990s. Correcting these problems seems unlikely to significantly reduce the slowdown. (with John Fernald and Marshall Reinsdorf)
IT Services and their Prices: What do they tell us about Productivity and Technology?. Overview of prices of computing & communications equipment and software, best practices for measurement, and implications for productivity and technology. (with Carol Corrado)
IT Asset Prices: Marshaling Evidence into New MeasuresEstimates, sources, and methods for computing & communications equipment and software for 1963-2015.
Acounting for Innovations in Consumer Digital Services: IT Still Matters. Accounting for consumer access to digital services---both purchased and generated by household IT equipment---shows that IT consumption has accelerated. (with Carol Corrado)

Narrow Scope

The Rise of Cloud Computing: Minding your P's, Q's, and K's. Sketches the nature and size of cloud computing and offers guidance on measuring the nominal value and the price of cloud computing investment
Prices for Communications Equipment: Rewriting the Record. Sources, methods, and estimates for the full range of communications equipment types. (with Carol Corrado) Recent trends in communications equipment prices is a short treatment of the same issues.
Quality-adjusted Price Measurement: A new Approach with Evidence from Semiconductors. An approach to measuring contract chip manufacturing using explicit modeling of the substitution between suppliers. (with Briak Kovak and Ryan Michaels)
Prices for Data Storage Equipment and the State of IT Innovation. Data storage equipment---often overlooked in discussions of IT---exhibits rapid price declines when measured well.
Prices and Depreciation in the Market for Tablet Computers. Joint estimation of prices and depreciation. (with Wendy Dunn and Eugenio Pinto)
The Increasing Deflationary Influence of Consumer Digital Access Services. Prices for internet, mobile phone, cable TV, and streaming services are 2 percent of U.S. household consumption and their prices are falling much quicker than is widely understood. (with Carol Corrado)
The Scope of U.S. "Factoryless Manufacturing". Firms that outsource fabrication but retain control of design are poorly captured in official statistics and are widespread across industries. (with Kim Bayard and Dominic Smith)
How Fast are Chip Prices Falling? We show that when performance on benchmark tasks is used to measure chip quality, microprocessor prices continued to fall rapidly through 2013. (with Dan Sichel and Steve Oliner)
Prices for High-Tech Products, Mismeasurement, and the Pace of Innovation. The wedge between innovation in the IT sector and the rest of the economy is wide, and substantially wider than statistics show. (with Dan Sichel and Steve Oliner)
Getting Smart about Phones: New Price INdexes and the Allocation of Spending Between Devices and Services Plans in Personal Consumption Expenditures. Demonstrates rapid declines in prices for smartphones result from hedonic quality adjustment and that PCE is missing a noteworthy share of smartphone consumption. (With Ana Aizcorbe and Dan Sichel)
Domestic Electronics Manufacturing: Medical, Military, and Aerospace Equipment and What We Don't Know about High-Tech Productivity The footprint of the electronics sector in the U.S. manufacturing sector is almost entirely special-purpose equipment, which have received little attention.