We document the nature of structural changes in employment to understand “jobless” growthin Irish Manufacturing in the aftermath of EEC/EU membership, 1972-2003. By 1972, fortyyears of protectionism and fifteen years of export promotion induced the coexistence of largeexporting plants with...

Does competitive pressure foster innovation? In addressing this important question, priorstudies ignored a distinction between discrete innovation aiming at entirely new technologyand continuous improvement consisting of numerous incremental improvements andmodifications made upon the existing...

Skill-biased technical change is usually interpreted in terms of the efficiency parameters ofskilled and unskilled labor. This implies that the relative productivity of skilled workerschanges proportionally in all tasks. In contrast, we argue that technical changes also affectthe curvature of...

The theory of endogenous technical change has deeply contributed to our understanding ofthe fundamental sources of economic growth and development. In this chapter we surveyimportant contributions in the field by focussing on the basic structure of endogenous growthmodels with horizontal as well...

We analyse the role of training in mitigating the negative impact of technical and organizational changes on the employment prospects of older workers. Using a panel of French firms in the late 1990s, we first estimate wage bill share equations for different age groups. Consistently with what is...

In contrast to the very large literature on skill-biased technical change among workers, there is hardly any work on the importance of skills for the entrepreneurs who employ those workers, and in particular on their evolution over time. This paper proposes a simple theory of skill-biased change...

Many governments wish to assess the quality of their universities. A prominent example is the UK's new Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In the REF, peer-review panels will be provided with information on publications and citations. This paper suggests a way in which panels could choose...

This paper argues that international migration of high-skilled workers triggers productivity effects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers may rise in host countries and decline in source countries. We exploit a recent data set on international bilateral migration flows...

In periods of accelerating technological change, incumbent workers must continuously update their skills to remain productive. In contrast, high school or college graduates recently entering the labor market often have the most up-to-date skills. We investigate how incumbent workers' careers...