New information and communication technologies, we argue, have been 'power-biased': they have allowed firms to monitor low-skill workers more closely, thus reducing the power of these workers. An efficiency wage model shows that 'power-biased technical change' in this sense may generate rising...

Although the Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper provides an analysis of one such link: the role of commercialisation in raising wages as impersonal labour market...

Although the Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper models and analyzes such link: the role of commercialisation in raising efficiency wages as impersonal and anonymous...

To explain the rise in the college wage premium in developed economies in the past decades, the present paper examines the effects of technological progress on workers effort incentives, which determine the effective labor supply. Five effort incentive effects of technological progress are...

US earnings inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and the prospect of a reversal depends on what caused the trend. The standard explanation emphasizes skill-biased technical change. This paper briefly considers some aggregation issues and then proceeds to outline two alternative...

We consider the links between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division of labor was coordinated...

Although the Industrial Revolution is often characterized as the culmination of a process of commercialisation, the precise nature of such a link remains unclear. This paper provides an analysis of one such link: the role of commercialisation in raising wages as impersonal labour market...

Technology can affect the distribution of income directly via its influence on both the bargaining power of different parties and the marginal product of different factors of production. This paper focuses mainly on the first route. The role of power is transparent in the case of medieval choke...

To explain the rise in the college wage premium in developed economies in the past decades, the present paper examines the effects of technological progress on workers' effort incentives, which determine the effective labor supply. Five effort incentive effects of technological progress are...