Date of Award
May 2021
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Economics
Committee Member
Paul P. Wilson
Committee Member
Frederick F. Hanssen
Committee Member
Matthew M. Lewis
Committee Member
Yichen Y. Zhou
Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three essays on operating performance in the global semiconductor industry, focusing on the impact of capital expenditure and business model.In the first chapter, I apply a panel data stochastic frontier approach to investigate the impacts of different business models in operating efficiencies in the global semiconductor industry. The efficiency scores are linked with the financial ratios and specified by cumulative probit distribution function, cumulative logit distribution function, and the Gumbel function respectively after disentangling the heterogeneity by the within transformation. The estimates by the nonlinear least squares technique indicate that the asset-light fabless companies have relatively higher efficiency scores among the different operating models in the global semiconductor industry. In the second chapter, I associate the semiparametric modified ordinary least squares approach by Simar et al. (2017) with the nonparametric shape constraint regression approach by Du et al. (2013) for performance evaluation in the semiconductor industry. Using panel data on 470 companies in the global semiconductor industry over 1999–2018, I compare technical efficiencies between the integrated device manufacturer business model and the fabless-foundry business model. The performance differences between the vertically integrated manufactures and the vertically specialized fabless and foundry firms are disentangled by the intensity of labor and capital in a very flexible format. The estimation results indicate that the capital intensive integrated device manufacturers taking the advantage of the economies of scale are operating more efficiently than the niche fabless companies in the global semiconductor industry. In the third chapter, I use a nonparametric production frontier approach to investigate the operating efficiency differences by the impacts of business model and capital expenditure in the global semiconductor industry. By using panel data on 470 companies in the global semiconductor industry over the 20 years 1999–2018, I compare the operating efficiencies between the integrated device manufacturers and the fabless and foundry firms. Handling the impact of capital expenditure as fixed input by directional distance estimator, I find that the fabless firms are operating less efficiently on average and that vertically integrated manufacturers dominate the semiconductor industry.
Recommended Citation
Qiao, Guangshun, "Essays on Capital Expenditure, Business Model, and Operating Performance in the Global Semiconductor Industry" (2021). All Dissertations. 2807.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/2807