A central determinant of the political economy of capital-labor relations is tha appropriability of specific quasi-rents. This paper is concerned with the general-equilibrium interaction of appropriability and characteristics of technology - nam ely, the embodiment of technology in capital and...

In market economies, identical workers receive very different wages, violating the Walrasian 'law of one price'. We argue that in the absence of a Walrasian auctioneer to coordinate trade, wage dispersion among identical workers is an equilibriu m phenomenon. Moreover, wage dispersion is...

This paper analyzes technology choices and unemployment in search equilibrium. In contrast to standard search models, the presence of technology choices makes the decentralized equilibrium inefficient; there is too little investment in skills, too little job creation and there can be multiple...

Are the large measured returns to on-the-job computer-use productivity gains or the result of unobserved heterogeneity unrelated to productivity? We examine this issue with two large cross-sectional surveys from Germany.