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...

In this paper, we study the development and underlying drivers of skill premiums in Germany between 1980 and 2008. We show that the significant increase in the medium to low skill wage premiums since the late 1980s was almost exclusively concentrated among the group of workers aged 30 or below....

At the turn of the millennium three frequently cited potential causes of new challenges for wage p olicy in Germany are revisited in this study: skilled-biased technological progress, the increasing international integration of labor and product markets, and the monetary integration of the EMU....

This paper investigates the effects of technological and organizational change (T&O) on jobs and workers. We show that although T&O reduces firm demand for routine relative to abstract task-based jobs, affected workers do not face higher probability of non-employment or lower earnings growth...

The euro area experienced a slowdown in output and Total Factor Productivity growth in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. We ask the following questions. Is the apparent slowdown in euro area output due to a lack of proper accounting for capital quality improvement? The answer is no. Did...

This paper develops a two-country, dynamic general equilibrium model with innovation contests to study the impact of globalization on the skill premium and fully-endogenous growth. Higher quality products are endogenously discovered through stochastic and sequential global innovation contests in...

We study how technology adoption and changes in global value chain (GVC) integration jointly affect labor shares and business function specialization in a sample of 14 manufacturing industries in 14 European countries in 1999-2011. Our main contribution is to highlight the indirect effect of...

This paper revisits one of the rare success stories in global environmental cooperation: the Montreal Protocol and the phase-out of ozone-depleting substances. I show that the protocol increased science and innovation on alternatives to ozone-depleting substances, and argue that agreements can...

In this paper, we empirically assess whether the perceived implications of technological innovations on the probability of job loss vary according to the innovation-related strategies adopted by firms. We take advantage of a unique dataset based on a large and representative cross-sectional...

Debates about the future of work frequently reference past instances of transformative innovation to preface analysis of how automation and artificial intelligence could reshape society and the economy. However, technological shifts in history are rarely considered in depth or used to improve...