Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century. This essay reviews...

This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz's seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three...

Goldin and Katz's <i>The Race between Education and Technology</i> is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the 20th century. This essay reviews the...

Internet-based educational resources are proliferating rapidly. One concern associated with these (potentially transformative) technological changes is that they will be disequalizing—as many technologies of the last several decades have been—creating superstar teachers and a winner-take-all...

This paper studies the effects of automation in economies with labor market distortions that generate worker rents--wages above opportunity cost--in some jobs. We show that automation targets high-rent tasks, dissipating rents and amplifying wage losses from automation. It also reduces...

We develop an assignment model of automation. Each of a continuum of tasks of variable complexity is assigned to either capital or one of a continuum of labor skills. We characterize conditions for interior automation, whereby tasks of intermediate complexity are assigned to capital. Interior...

For many problems in macroeconomics, development economics, labor economics, and international trade, whether technical change is biased towards particular factors is of central importance. This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the forces that shape these biases. There are two major...

We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families at the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is...

I present a model where firms decide what types of jobs to create and then search for suitable workers. When there are few skilled workers and the skilled-unskilled productivity gap is small, firms create a single type of job and recruit all workers. An increase in the proportion of skilled...