We build a directed technical change model of the British Industrial Revolution where one intermediate goods sector uses a fixed renewable energy (“wood”) quantity, and another uses coal at a fixed price. With a high enough elasticity of substitution between the two goods in producing final...

Technical change in key OECD countries since 1990 is examined in terms of its contributions to total factor productivity and to factor bias. The dependence of real income and inequality on changes in factor abundance, total factor productivity, factor bias, the relative cost of capital goods and...

World and U.S. energy intensities have declined over the past century, falling at an average rate of approximately 1.2–1.5 percent a year. The decline has persisted through periods of stagnating or even falling energy prices, suggesting the decline is driven in large part by autonomous...

Continued automation and declines in low-skill shares of GDP have been widespread globally and linked to inequality. We examine the long-term, global consequences of policies that foster automation or address the distributional consequences of it, using a six-region global macro model. Results...

The dependence of real income and inequality on changes in factor abundance, total factor productivity, factor bias, the relative cost of capital goods and the progressivity of the tax system are quantified using an elemental general equilibrium model with three households. Observed declines in...

In transitional economies like China, comparatively low real wages imply sub-OECD labor and skill shares of value added and comparatively high capital shares. Despite rapid real wage growth, however, rather than converge toward the OECD, China's low-skill labor share has been falling, due to...

This paper uses a benchmark climate model with endogenous technical change to consider the effects of three extensions on optimal policy under a clean transition. First, the movement of workers between non-energy and energy sectors lowers the cost of abatement by more than an order of magnitude,...

The framework used to endogenise technology growth by Acemoglu, Aghion, Bursztyn, and Hemous (2012), hereafter AABH, allows the existence of unstable equilibria and does not provide a rationale for specifying which equilibrium should apply when more than one exists. This paper: (i) suggests a...