This paper focuses on the bi-directional interaction between technology adoption and labor market conditions. We examine cross-city differences in PC-adoption, relative wages, and changes in relative wages over the period 1980-2000 to evaluate whether the patterns conform to the predictions of a...

We document a large increase in the cyclicality of the incomes of high-income households, coinciding with the rise in their share of aggregate income. In the U.S., since top income shares began to rise rapidly in the early 1980s, incomes of those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution...

Over the 1980s and 1990s the wage differentials between men and women (with similar observable characteristics) declined significantly. At the same time, the returns to education increased. It has been suggested that these two trends may reflect a common change in the relative price of a skill...

High-skilled immigrants are a very important component of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. workers in these fields, and they have a similar contribution in terms of output measures like patents or firm starts. This contribution has been...

This paper shows that different labor market policies can lead to differences in technology across sectors in a model of labor saving technologies. Labor market regulations reduce the skill premium and as a result, if technologies are labor saving, countries with more stringent labor regulation,...

Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data to answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points, and...

Goldin and Katz's <i>The Race between Education and Technology</i> is a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the 20th century. This essay reviews the...

What explains the current low rate of employment in the US? While there has been substantial debate over this question in recent years, we believe that considerable added insight can be derived by focusing on changes in the labor market at the turn of the century. In particular, we argue that in...

Firms play a central role in the selection, sponsorship, and employment of skilled immigrants entering the United States for work through programs like the H-1B visa. This role has not been widely recognized in the literature, and the data to better understand it have only recently become...

This paper revisits the important ideas proposed by Atkinson and Stiglitz's seminal 1969 paper on technological change. After linking these ideas to the induced innovation literature of the 1960s and the more recent directed technological change literature, it explains how these three...