Productivity Program meeting.

• Position: Bureau News - National Bureau of Economic Research

The NBER's Program on Productivity met in Cambridge on March 14. Shane Greenstein, NBER and Northwestern University, organized thc meeting. These papers were discussed:

Barbara K. Atrostic and Sang Nguyen, Center for Economic Studies, "IT and Productivity in IT-Using and IT-Producing Industries: New Micro Data Evidence" Discussant: Christopher Forman, Carnegie-Mellon University

James Bessen, Research on Innovation, "Technology Adoption Costs and Productivity Growth: The Transition to Information Technology" Discussant: Shane Greenstein

Dan Elfenbein, Harvard University, and Josh Lerner, NBER and Harvard University, "Designing Alliance Contracts: Exclusivity and Contingencies in Internet Portal Alliances"

Discussant: Iain Cockburn, NBER and Boston University

Kenneth Flamm, University of Texas, Austin, "Moore's Law and the Economics of Semiconductor Price Trends"

Discussant: Rebecca Henderson, NBER and MIT

Minjae Song, Harvard University, "Measuring Consumer Welfare in the CPU Marker"

Sean M. Dougherty, Robert H. McGuckin, and Bart Van Ark, The Conference Board, Internationalization and the Changing Structure of Business

R&D: Recent Trends and Measurement Implications"

Atrostic and Nguyen use new plant-level data on information technology (IT) collected by the U.S. Census Bureau to provide evidence on the labor productivity impact of IT across U.S. manufacturing plants in IT-producing and IT-using industries (defined under the North American Industrial Classification System). Previous plant-level studies examining the link between productivity and computers or other IT in the United States typically focused on the presence of computers, either using data on the stock of computer capital or on current IT or computer investment as proxies for the computer stock. Studies that have detailed information on IT generally have a relatively small sample, do not include smaller plants, or are limited to specific manufacturing industries. The data for this study, in contrast, are collected from about 30,000 plants across the U.S. manufacturing sector. The authors use a direct measure of IT: information on the presence of computer networks. They find that computer networks have a posit ive and significant effect on labor productivity after they control for other important factors, such as capital intensity and other plant characteristics, and even after taking account of possible endogeneity of the computer network variable. Also, small plants appear to...