The paper analyzes the contemporary organizational restructuring of production and work within firms. We emphasize the shift from a "Tayloristic" organization of work (characterized by significant specialization by tasks) to a "holistic" organization (featuring job rotation, integration of tasks...

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...

I study a model where Information Technology, while typically increasing overall inequality, is likely to harm some people at intermediate and high levels of the distribution of income but to benefit people at the bottom. Within a given occupation it may harm some workers while benefitting...

This paper shows that top management structures in large US firms radically changed since the mid-1980s. While the number of managers reporting directly to the CEO doubled, the growth was driven primarily by functional managers rather than general managers. Using panel data on senior management...

An increasingly influential technological-discontinuity paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some limited...

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...