A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two...

I consider an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labor force, the market for skill-complementary technologies...

We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and...