This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

Do higher wages lead to more automation innovation? To answer this question, we first use the frequency of certain keywords in patent text to create a new measure of automation innovation in machinery. We show that our measure is correlated with a reduction in routine tasks in a cross-sectoral...

Robert Gordons Hypothese der schwächelnden Innovationen und der Gegenwinde ist ein interessanter Erklärungsansatz für das Phänomen der niedrigen Produktivitäts- und Wirtschaftswachstumsraten in den entwickelten Volkswirtschaften. Die Verlangsamung des Wirtschaftswachstums und der...

Job polarization the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs occurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and...

This volume was prepared by Sebastian Benz while he was working at the Ifo Institute. It was completed in December 2013 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It includes five self-contained chapters. All chapters discuss different...

In this paper we study the impact of the income distribution on innovation through the demand for quality goods. For simplicity, we assume that there are two types of consumers, rich and poor. The income distribution is measured by the population share of the poor and the relative income of the...