A trade union whose purpose is to raise wages above the competitive level may foster economic growth if it succeeds in shifting income away from the owners of capital to the workers and if the workers' marginal propensity to save exceeds the one of capitalists. We make this point in an...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

There is growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the sectoral allocation of resources, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand across...

We introduce distributive justice into a simple model of growth and distribution. Two groups ("classes") of otherwise identical, capital-rich and capital-poor individuals ("capitalists") and ("workers") are in conflict over factor (labour-capital) shares. Capitalists' (workers') ideal labour...

Did recent technological change, in the form of automation, affect immigration policy in the United States? I argue that as automation shifted employment from routine to manual occupations at the bottom end of the skill distribution, it increased competition between natives and immigrants,...

How does population aging affect economic growth and factor shares in times of increasingly automatable production processes? The present paper addresses this question in a new macroeconomic model of automation where competitive firms perform tasks to produce output. Tasks require labor and...

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...

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 uses a seasonal long-memory model to capture the behaviour of the US Industrial Production Index (IPI) over the period 1919Q1-2022Q4. This series is found to display a large value of the periodogram at the zero, long-run frequency, and to exhibit an order of integration around 1. When...