We augment standard ln earnings equations with variables reflecting unmeasured attributes of workers and measured and unmeasured attributes of their employer. Using panel employee-establishment data for US manufacturing we find that the observable employer characteristics that most impact...

We analyze the effect of patent thickets on entry into technology areas by firms in the UK. We present a model that describes incentives to enter technology areas characterized by varying technological opportunity, complexity, and the potential for hold-up due to the presence of patent thickets....

Current concern with relationships among particular technologies, capital, and the wage structure motivates this study of the origins of technology-skill complementarity in manufacturing. We offer evidence of the existence of technology-skill and capital-skill (relative) complementarities from...

This paper examines the relationship between technological change and wages using pooled cross-sectional industry-level data and several alternative indicators of the rate of introduction of new technology. Our main finding is that industries with a high rate of technical change pay higher wages...

The existing literature on skill-biased technical change has not considered how the technological endowment itself plays a role in the returns to skill. This paper constructs a simple model of skill biased technical change which highlights the role that resource endowments play in the returns to...

The earnings and occupational task requirements of immigrants to Canada are analyzed. The growing education levels of immigrants in the 1990s have not led to a large improvement in earnings as one might expect if growing computerization and the resulting technological change was leading to a...

Evolution of technology causes human capital to become obsolete. We study this phenomenon in an overlapping generations setting, assuming it is hard to predict how technology will evolve, and that older workers find updating uneconomic. Among our results is the proposition that (under certain...

Previous research has found evidence that wages in industries characterized as high tech,' or subject to higher rates of technological change, are higher. In addition, there is evidence that skill-biased technological change is responsible for the dramatic increase in the earnings of more...

This paper proposes a new and unified explanation for the following trends observed over the last 25 years: (1) the increased returns to education, (2) the slow measured growth in TFP in an economy undergoing massive changes in its methods of production, and (3) the poor wage performance,...

This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an...