Innovative workplace practices based on multi-tasking and ICT that have been diffusing in most OECD countries since the 1990s have strong consequences on working conditions. Available data show together with the emergence of new organizational forms like multi-tasking, the increase in the...

This paper derives the optimal pace of capital accumulation at the firm level and the corresponding investment dynamics in the presence of an energy-saving technological progress. Energy and capital are complementary. When technical progress is disembodied, the firm invests once at the first...

In this paper, an endogenous growth model is built up incorporating Schumpeterian growth and embodied technological progress. Under embodiment, long run growth is affected by the following effects : (i) obsolescence costs add to the user cost of capital, reducing the research effort; and (ii)...

In this paper, we study the properties of optimal growth models à la Nelson and Phelps (1966) where the labor resources of an economy can be allocated freely either to production, technology adoption or capital maintenance. We first characterize the balanced growth paths of a benchmark model...

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...

The productivity slowdown faced by the US economy since the first oil shock has been associated with a rise in the decline rate of the relative price of equipment and a reduction in the rate of disembodied technical change. We build up a growth model in which learning-by-doing is the engine of...

This paper is concerned with the theoretical properties of demand for capital maintenance services. To this end, we consider two investment problems incorporating maintenance services and we analyse their steady state equilibria. At first, we shwo that if no variable capital utilization rate is...

We investigate and interpret sorne of the properties of a multi-sectoral growth model with endogenous embodied technical change in the light of the ongoing debate on the viability of an IT based growth regime. In particular. we illustrate the two main views of the 1995-2000 IT boom in the USA....

A benchmark AK optimal growth model with maintenance expenditures and endogeneous utilization of capital is considered within an explicit vintage capital framework. Scrapping is endogenous, and the model allows for a clean distinction between age and usage dependent capital depreciation and...

We develop a tractable general theory for the study of the economic and demographic impact of epidemics, and notably its distributional consequences. To this end, we develop a three-period overlapping generations model where altruistic parents choose optimal health expenditures for their...