Leading empiricists and theorists of cities have recently argued that the generation and exchange of ideas must play a more central role in the analysis of cities. This paper develops the first system of cities model with costly idea exchange as the agglomeration force. Our model replicates a...

The neoclassical growth accounting model used by the BLS to sort out the contributions of the various sources of growth in the U.S. economy accords a relatively small role to education. This result seems at variance with the revolution in information technology and the emergence of the...

Human capital is almost always identified as a crucial ingredient for growing economies, but empirical investigations of cross-national growth have done little to clarify the dimensions of relevant human capital or any implications for policy. This paper concentrates on the importance of labor...

Unlike physical capital, human capital has both embodied and disembodied dimensions. It can be perceived of as skill and acquired knowledge, but also as knowledge spillover effects between overlapping generations and across different skill groups within and across countries. We illustrate the...

Almost all of the literature about the growth of income inequality and the relationship between skilled and unskilled wages approaches the issue from the production side of general equilibrium (skill-biased technical change, international trade). Here, we add a role for income-dependent demand...

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...

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and six proxies for industry rates of technological change, we study the impact of technological change on skill accumulation among young male workers in the manufacturing sector during the time period 1987 through 1992. Production workers...

This paper investigates some alternative definitions of labor for productivity and demand analysis. The paper is organized as follows: Section II considers the organization of work activities in a simple fixed coefficient technology in the presence of comparative advantage among various classes...

This paper examines the productivity (and wage) gains from locating in dense, urban environments. We distinguish between three potential explanations of why firms are willing to pay urban workers more: (1) the urban wage premium is spurious and is the result of omitted ability measures, (2) the...