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...

Significant policy effort is devoted to stimulate the development, adoption and diffusion of environmental-friendly technology. Sceptics worry about the effects of regulation-induced environmental technology on firms competitiveness. Since innovation is a crucial productivity driver, a potential...

We study economic growth and pollution control in a model with endogenous rate and direction of technical change. Economic growth (growth of real GDP) results from growth in the quantity and productivity of polluting intermediates. Pollution can be controlled by reducing the pollution intensity...

This paper investigates the effect of market size on innovation activities across different durable good industries in the Chinese manufacturing sector. We use a potential market size measure driven only by changes in the Chinese income distribution which is exogenous to changes in prices and...

In the recent last years, in particular in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, many countries initiated economic recovery plans with a major focus on stimulating green entrepreneurial activities to revive economic growth. Further, the recovery plans intend to improve a...

We study the effect of railroad access on urban population growth. Using GIS techniques, we match triennial population data for roughly 1,000 cities in nineteenth-century Prussia to georeferenced maps of the German railroad network. We find positive short- and long-term effects of having a...

The determinants of the direction of technical change and the implications for economic growth are studied in the one-sector neoclassical growth model of Ramsey (1928), Cass (1965), and Koopmans (1965) extended to allow for endogenous capital- and labor-augmenting technical change. For this...

Skill-Biased Technical Change is one of the most prominent explanations for the rise in wage inequality in the United States over the last decades. However, the explanation is challenged for several reasons. In this paper, I propose an alternative type of technical change, where new technologies...

Chapter 1: Editors’ Introduction -- Part I: Expert Overviews -- Chapter 2: Developing Meaningful Composite Environmental Indices with DEA -- Chapter 3: Modelling the Generation of Pollutants in Environmental Economics -- Chapter 4: Environmental Productivity Growth in Consumer Durables -- Part...