We describe how a single technological innovation, the introduction of image processing of checks, led to distinctly different changes in the structure of jobs in two departments of a large bank overseen by one group of managers. In the downstairs deposit processing department, image processing...

The rise in wage inequality in the U.S. labor market during the 1980s is usually attributed to skill-biased technical change (SBTC), associated with the development of personal computers and related information technologies. We review the evidence in favor of this hypothesis, focusing on the...

We apply an understanding of what computers do -- the execution of procedural or rules-based logic -- to study how computer technology alters job skill demands. We contend that computer capital (1) substitutes for a limited and well-defined set of human activities, those involving routine...

The object of this paper is to show how population growth, through its interaction with recent technological and organizational developments, can account for many of the cross-country differences in economic outcome observed among industrialized countries over the last 20 years. In particular,...

During the Industrial Revolution technological progress and innovation became the main drivers of economic growth. But why was Britain the technological leader? We argue that one hitherto little recognized British advantage was the supply of highly skilled, mechanically able craftsmen who were...

Technological change was unskilled-labor-biased during the early Industrial Revolution, but is skill-biased today. This is not embedded in extant unified growth models. We develop a model which can endogenously account for these facts, where factor bias reflects profit-maximizing decisions by...

This paper focuses on the causes of increased wage inequality in OECD countries in recent years and its decomposition into the component factors of trade surges in low wage products and technological change that has preoccupied the trade and wages literature. It argues that the length of...

This paper compares the impact of new IT-enhanced technology on the efficiency of production in the U.S. and the U.K. for one manufacturing industry, valve manufacturing. There is a long-standing question of whether technological change and organizational changes have the same rates of adoption...

On the basis of a country*industry unbalanced panel data sample for 14 OECD countries and 18 industries covering the years 1988 to 2007, this study proposes an econometric investigation of the effects of the OECD Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) indicator on capital intensity for four...

The main objective of the study is descriptive. We set out to explore the (cor)relations between five IT and R&D indicators and measures of labor and total factor productivity, average wage and skill composition, on four panel data samples of French manufacturing and services firms over the two...