We develop a model of endogenous skill-biased technical change in developing countries.  The model reconciles wildly dispersed existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers.  It also produces an estimating equation for the elasticity, which allow...

This paper uses the adoption and invention of the spinning jenny as a test case to understand why the industrial revolution occurred in Britain in the eighteenth century rather than in France or India.  It is shown that wages were much higher relative to capital prices in Britain than in other...

In this paper, we first present a summary of the literature dealing with the question of the existence of externalities of employer provided and funded training. Using French data, we then estimate the impact of this kind of training on wages, while paying special attention to the mobility after...

In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience.  If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience.  Using the Panel Study of...

Commentators claim that a shortage of skills in South Africa is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations. This assumes or implies skilled and unskilled labour are complements. Hicks Elasticities of Complementarity and elasticities of factor price...

This paper builds a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of endogenous growth that is capable of generating substantial degrees of endogenous persistence in productivity.  When products go out of patent protection, the rush of entry into their production destroys incentives for...

The commercial value of basic knowledge depends on the arrival of follow-up developments mostly from outside the boundaries of the inventing firm. Private returns would depend on the extent the inventing firm internalizes these follow-up developments. Such internalization is less likely to occur...

It is shown that spillovers can enhance private returns to innovation if they feed back into the dynamic research of the original inventor (Internalized spillovers), but will always reduce private returns, if the original inventor does not benefit from the advancements other inventors build into...

What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the general question driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wage behavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is evaluated. Based...