Abstract
Studies of the economic effect of learning-by-doing in production have been hampered by the difficulty in obtaining firm-specific cost of production data. After the 1986 Trade Agreement between the United States and Japan, the U.S. Commerce Department made public masked versions of the cost of production of many semiconductor products sold in the U.S. by Japanese firms. This paper presents some of these masked, quarterly, firm-specific production cost data for different densities of DRAMs and EPROMs. The data do not give much support to the hypothesis of strong firm-specific learning-by-doing in semiconductor production. The rate of learning-by-doing may also differ significantly across firms, which also casts doubt on the impact of learning-by-doing on market structure.
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Economic Regulatory Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, Room 10-004, Bicentennial Building, 600 E Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20530. Ruth Raubitschek, Rick Warren-Boulton, Greg Werden and an anonymous referee made helpful comments. I have not always heeded all of their advice, and am responsible for all errors. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Nye, W.W. Firm-specific learning-by-doing in semiconductor production: Some evidence from the 1986 Trade Agreement. Review of Industrial Organization 11, 383–394 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00414406
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00414406