Skill-biased technical change has occupied empirical economists for much of the 90s. However, the empirical literature has not progressed much beyond observing a positive correlation between technology indicators and demand shifts. Two hypotheses on the root causes of skill biases in technical...

Vintage human capital models imply that young workers will be the primary adopters and beneficiaries of new technologies. Because technological progress in general, and computers in particular, may be skill-biased and because human capital increases over the lifecycle, technological change may...

While the economic theory predicts that developing countries will gain the most from technology spillovers, there have been only a few analyses looking at this question empirically. The present study focuses on a panel of 27 transition and 20 Western European countries between 1990 and 2006 and...

Several trade-based measures of product variety have recently been used implicitly to represent states of technology, promoting long-run growth. In this paper, we define the state of technology as the range of specialised production processes and propose the variety of capital goods available...

This paper seeks to gain insights on the relationship between growth and unemployment, when considering heterogeneous agents in terms of age. We introduce life cycle features in the endogenous job destruction framework à la Mortensen and Pissarides (1998). We show that, under the assumption of...

Most existing empirical work on technology diffusion assumes technologies to remain constant throughout the diffusion process. However, many consumer technologies improve significantly over time. Using data on the characteristics of new mobile handsets over a ten-year period and controlling for...

General purpose technologies (GPT) have a significant impact on economic activity through radical technological change and wide technological diffusion. This paper aims to address the generality of technologies associated with the GPT concept. Information and communications technologies (ICT),...

This paper presents the first empirical test with German firm level data of a hypothesis derived by Bustos (AER 2011) in a model that explains the decision of heterogeneous firms to export and to engage in R&D. Using a non-parametric test for first order stochastic dominance it is shown that, in...

This paper focuses on the relationship between technological innovation and international trade. In particular, the effect of technological achievement on exports is studied. In order to measure technological innovation, the technological achievement index (TAI) is used, thus providing a summary...

In the discussion on innovations for sustainable development, radical innovations are frequently called for in order that the transformation of society to a system perceived as sustainable can succeed. The reason given for this is the greater environmental efficiency of these innovations. This...