To what extent can technological advances in the production of capital account for the recent, worldwide decline in the labor income share? We pose two challenges to the automation narrative: first, estimates of the elasticity of substitution (EOS) between capital and labor tend to fall below or...

Boys are doing worse in school than are girls, which has been dubbed "the Boy Crisis." An analysis of the latest data on educational outcomes among boys and girls reveals extensive disparities in grades, reading and writing test scores, and other measurable educational outcomes, and these...

Between 1999 and 2006, Brazilian cities experienced strong growth in the provision of internet services, driven in part by the privatization of the telecommunications industry. A main concern of policymakers is that digital technology replaces routine, manual tasks, displacing lower-skilled...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...

The recent deployment of fibre-optic submarine cables (SMCs) in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) raised the prospects for the digital economy expansion and the whole sub-continent take-off, but also exposed countries and populations to new sources of vulnerability. This paper provides empirical evidence...

We study the effect of internet diffusion on childbirth procedures performed in England between 2000 and 2011. We exploit an identification strategy based on geographical discontinuities in internet access generated by technological factors. We show that broadband internet access increased...

We study whether technology gains in sectors related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) increase productivity in the rest of the economy. To separate exogenous gains in ICT from other technological progress, we use the relative price of ICT goods and services in a structural VAR...

Does access to information and communication technologies (ICT) increase innovation? We examine this question by exploiting the staggered adoption of BITNET across U.S. universities in the 1980s. BITNET, an early version of the Internet, enabled e-mail-based knowledge exchange and collaboration...

We study the impact of techies-engineers and other technically trained workers-on firm-level productivity. We first report new facts on the role of techies in the firm by leveraging French administrative data and unique surveys. Techies are STEM-skill intensive and are associated with...

I estimate CES aggregate production functions for the US, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Spain using data from the EU KLEMS database. I distinguish between three types of capital: information and communication technologies (ICT), intellectual property (IP) capital, and traditional capital. I assume...