An analytical framework is developed to study the repercussions between endogenous capital- and labor-saving technical change and population aging. Following an intuition often attributed to Hicks (1932), I ask whether and how population aging aff ects the relative scarcity of factors of...

The long-run evolution of per-capita income exhibits a structural break often associated with the Industrial Revolution. We follow Mokyr (2002) and embed the idea that this structural break reflects a regime switch in the evolution of technological knowledge into a dynamic framework, using Airy...

This paper revisits the debate about the appropriate differential equation that governs the evolution of knowledge in models of endogenous growth. We argue that the assessment of the appropriateness of an equation of motion should not only be based on its implications for the future, but that it...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

At least since 1870 hours worked per worker declined and real wages increased in many of today's industrialized countries. The dual nature of technological progress in conjunction with a consumption-leisure complementarity explains these stylized facts. Technological progress drives real wages...