Many papers have shown that U.S. earnings inequalityincreased substantially from about 1980 to around 1996.1Recent and careful studies agree that a basic explanationfor increased earnings inequality is the rising returns tohuman capital resulting from new technology. These risingreturns have...

[...]The loss of manufacturing jobs has created a widespreadsense that manufacturing in New York City has nofuture, that the decline is unstoppable and “largely inevitableand foreordained” (Fitch 1993, p. 107). Even theoptimistic report of the Commission on the Year 2000,New York Ascendant,...

When taking into account time, services can experience similar productivity gains as manufacturing. Motion pictures constituted the first technology that industrialized a labour-intensive service. Measuring output in time spent consuming them doubles output growth from 4.2 to as much as 9...

This paper examines the effect of a new technology on a labour-intensive service. Comparing primal and dual TFP-growth with final-year social savings, we find that, between 1900 and 1938, motion pictures increased entertainment output (measured in spectator-hours) by at least nine percent...

From 1945 to 1975, fifteen Western European countries passed school-leaving age laws that raised the number of years of compulsory schooling for the first time after the Second World War. In order to understand the driving forces behind the increase in compulsory schooling and to explain the...

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest among growth economists in General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). A GPT can be defined as "a technology that initially has much scope for improvement and evntually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many Hicksian and...

In an influential article Saxonhouse and Wright argued that the quality of local cottonwas the single most important factor in explaining national preferences for ring ormule spinning. For Britain, they argue that mills using more flexible mule spindlescould exploit arbitrage opportunities...

This paper re-examines theories previously advanced to explain Lancashire’s slowadoption of ring spinning. New cost estimates show that although additionaltransport costs and technical complementarities between certain types of machinereduced ring adoption rates, these supply side constraints...

This paper is motivated by two broad questions: how is technologytransferred from academia to non-academic domains, and how welldo facts within these technologies travel? These questions areexplored in the context of a particular extension education program inTamil Nadu, south India. The paper...

During the same period in which political decisions became increasingly indistinguishable from decisions about science and technology, science and technology became increasingly incomprehensible to all but a few specialists. Maintaining a healthy participatory democracy under such conditions...