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...

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...

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...