TY  - JOUR
AU  - Berndt,Ernst R.
AU  - Griliches,Zvi
TI  - Price Indexes for Microcomputers:  An Exploratory Study
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 3378
PY  - 1990
Y2  - June 1990
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3378
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w3378.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ernst R. Berndt
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-518
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/253-2665
Fax: 617-227-0880
E-Mail: eberndt@mit.edu

Zvi Griliches
E-Mail: N/A user is deceased
M1  - published as Ernst R. Berndt, Zvi Griliches. "Price Indexes for Microcomputers: An Exploratory Study," in Murry Foss, Marylin Manser, and Allan Young, editors, "Price Measurements and Their Uses" University of Chicago Press (1993)

AB  - In this paper we focus on alternative procedures for calculating and interpreting quality-adjusted price indexes for microcomputers, based on a variety of estimated hedonic price equations. Our data set comprises an unbalanced panel for 1265 model observations from 1982 to 1988, and includes both list and discount prices. We develop and implement empirically a specification test for selecting preferable hedonic price  equations, and consider in detail the alternative interpretations of dummy variable coefficients having time and age, vintage and age, and all of the time, age, and vintage dummy variables as regressors. We then calculate a variety of quality-adjusted price indexes; for the Divisja indexes we employ estimated hedonic price equations to predict prices of unobserved models (pre-entry and post-exit). Although our indexes show a modest amount of variation, we find that on average over the 1982-88 time period in the US, quality-adjusted real prices for microcomputers decline at about 28% per year.
ER  -