The present analysis investigates skill requirements in the workplace, measured directly by the task-composition of occupations. It shows that the task composition of occupations has shifted toward analytical and interactive activities and away from manual and cognitive routine activities in...

Based on a large data set containing information on occupations between 1979 and 1999, this study explores the ?black box? surrounding the skill?biased technological change hypothesis by analyzing the mechanisms that induce information technologies to be complementary to employees with higher...

This paper discusses the link between patterns of technological change and economic development taking an evolutionary perspective. We argue that the modes and timing of such coupled dynamics are deeply influenced by the emergence of new techno-economic paradigms or regimes. ICT-based...

This paper explores how firms' skills and organizational change affect the returns from investments in ICT. Our work contributes to the literature by testing the hypothesis of complementarity in a panel of 540 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995-2000. By drawing on different statistical...

An increasingly influential technological-discontinuity paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some limited...

This paper presents statistical evidence on (1) the importance of 'soft' capital spending items like marketing and R&D investments, and (2) the dominant service content of production in the modern manufacturing firm. It pictures the firm as a dominantly information processing entity that has...

This positional contribution has a twofold aim: the first is to explore the recent empirical literature developed around the issue of how the adoption of new technologies within the firm has changed the skill requirements of occupations; the second is to conjecture on the relationship, and on...

This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities...