This paper examines the extent to which changes in working-age shares associated with population aging might slow economic growth in upcoming years. We first analyze the economic effects of changing working-age shares in a standard empirical growth model using country panel data from 1950-2015....

David Ricardo initially believed machinery would help workers but revised his opinion, likely based on the impact of automation in the textile industry. Despite cotton textiles becoming one of the largest sectors in the British economy, real wages for cotton weavers did not rise for decades. As...

We examine the long transition from water to steam power in US manufacturing, focusing on early users of mechanical power: lumber and flour mills. Digitizing Census of Manufactures manuscripts for 1850 to 1880, we show that as steam costs declined, manufacturing activity grew faster in counties...

We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy during the long 19th century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. We show that states deployed a vast variety of different policies aimed at, primarily, but not exclusively, fostering industrialization....

We address three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories ('new work') in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work; where does it come from; and what effect does it have on...

The evolution of work is of emerging importance to advanced economies' growth. In this study, we develop a new semantic-distance-based algorithm to identify "new work," namely the new types of jobs introduced in the US. We characterize how "new work" relates to task content of jobs and skill...

Global innovation and entrepreneurship has traditionally been dominated by a handful of high-income countries, especially the US. This paper investigates the international consequences of the rise of a new hub for innovation, focusing on the dramatic growth of high-potential entrepreneurship and...

This review considers the evolution of economic thinking on the relationship between digital technology and inequality across four decades, encompassing four related but intellectually distinct paradigms, which I refer to as the education race, the task polarization model, the...

Does capital accumulation increase labor demand and wages? Neoclassical production functions, where capital and labor are q-complements, ensure that the answer is yes, so long as labor markets are competitive. This result critically depends on the assumption that capital accumulation does not...

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic...