Will smart machines replace humans like the internal combustion engine replaced horses? If so, can putting people out of work, or at least out of good work, also put the economy out of business? Our model says yes. Under the right conditions, more supply produces, over time, less demand as the...

Recently, the relative demand for skilled labor has increased dramatically. We investigate one of the causes, skill-biased technical change. Advances in information technology (IT) are among the most powerful forces bearing on the economy. Employers who use IT often make complementary...

In recent years, the designs of many new blockchain applications have been inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume that most system nodes are honest (in that they follow the protocol), we recognize that blockchains are deployed in...

In this paper we study how the existence of a functioning market for technology differentially conditions the entry strategy and survival of different types of entrants, and the role of scale, marketing ability and technical assets. Markets for technology facilitate entry of firms that lack...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? What qualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In this paper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchies in which organizations arise endogenously...

We present a theory of the organization of work in an economy where knowledge is an essential input in production: a knowledge economy. In this economy a continuum of agents with heterogeneous skills must choose how much knowledge to acquire and may produce on their own or in organizations. Our...

Electricity and Information Technology (IT) are perhaps the two most important general purpose technologies (GPTs) to date. We analyze how the U.S. economy reacted to them. The Electricity and IT eras are similar, but also differ in several important ways. Electrification was more broadly...

This paper considers two challenges that improvements in private-sector information-processing capabilities may pose for the effectiveness of monetary policy. It first considers the consequences of improved information about central-bank actions, and argues that the management of expectations...

We examine two factors frequently thought to be changing the U.S. workplace, high performance work practices and computer use, and their relationships with pay using a national probability sample of U.S. establishments. The analysis controls for both organizational and individual characteristics...