This paper examines the endogenous interaction between the rise in female labor force participation and changes in both the method and mode of production that occurred during the early part of the 20th century. Within a dynamic general equilibrium framework, an exogenous expansion in the skill...

In recent years, a large body of empirical research has investigated whether the predictions of secondgeneration growth models are consistent with actual data. This strand of literature has focused on the longrun properties of these models by using productivity and innovation data but has not...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. Developing countries are currently making huge investments in electrification, with a view to achieving structural change. What does history say about its impact on the structure of employment? We...

Electricity is a general purpose technology and the catalyst for the second industrial revolution. What was its impact on the structure of employment? We use U.S. Census data from 1910 to 1940 and measure electrification with the length of higher-voltage electricity lines. Instrumenting for...

We examine how women's employment leads to household technology adoption in the context of mid-century United States. We posit that this relationship is strongest for households with low earning capacity whose consumption-leisure tradeoff crosses a threshold as women go to work. Using WWII...

Current concern with relationships among particular technologies, capital and the wage structure motivates this study of the origins of technology-skill complementarity in manufacturing. We offer evidence of the existence of technology-skill and capital-skill (relative) complementarities from...

During the Second Industrial Revolution, in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of automation technologies coincided with substantial job creation but also a "hollowing out" of middle-skilled job opportunities, which historically offered reliable paths to prosperity. We use recently...

This paper studies the impact of the first effective medical treatment for an infectious disease -diphtheria antitoxin- on the historical health transition in the United States. Using an instrumental variable for local antitoxin adoption rates and information from approximately 1.6 million death...

Does the concept of General Purpose Technologies help explain periods of faster and slower productivity advance in economies? The paper develops a new comparative data set on the usage of electricity in the manufacturing sectors of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and Japan and proceeds to...