In this note we compare the laissez-faire steady-state solution in the Howitt and Aghion (1998) model to the social optimum. The analysis offers several new insights in comparison to the welfare analysis in Aghion and Howitt (1992). We find various new distortions between private and optimal...

This paper presents a dynamic model that analyzes how firms' expectations with regards to technological change influence the demand for outsourcing. We show that outsourcing becomes more beneficial to the firm when technology is changing rapidly. As the pace of innovations in production...

We present a dynamic model where the probability of outsourcing production is increasing in the firm's expectation of technological change. As the pace of innovations in production technologies increases, the less time the firm has to amortize the sunk costs associated with purchasing and...

In this study we use a unique database covering 25 manufacturing and service sectors for 16 European countries over the period 1996-2005, for a total of 2,295 observations, and apply GMM-SYS panel estimations of a demand-for-labour equation augmented with technology. We find that R&D...

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It...

The impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestically owned firms in developing countries has been widely debated in the literature. It has been argued that FDI provides access to advanced technologies and other intangible assets which may spill over to the host country and allow...

This paper attempts to add to the understanding of the causes for the differing recent developments in inequality in OECD countries. The similarity of shocks and technological changes affecting these countries suggests that interactions of these shocks and countryspecific institutions are...

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

This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and unemployment, when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of age. We introduce life cycle features in the endogenous job destruction framework à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1998). We show that, under the assumption of...

In recent decades most developed countries have experienced an increase in income inequality. In this paper, we use an equilibrium search framework to shed additional light on what is causing an income distribution to change. The major benefit of the model is that it can accommodate shocks to...