The debate about whether technical progress causes technological unemployment, as the Luddites argued in the early 19th century, has recently resurfaced in the context of new technologies and automation and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. We review the main issues and then consider...

In Australia, and in other countries, we observe at any one time a wide distribution of hours worked per week. We develop a cost-minimising model to explain employer choices over the number of employees and their hours of work. An important finding is that hours of work and the number of...

This paper lays out a replication plan for the influential paper by Klump et al. (Factor Substitution and Factor-augmenting Technical Progress in the United States: a Normalized Supply-side System Approach, Review of Economics and Statistics, 2007) on using a normalized CES supply-side system...

This paper lays out a replication plan for the influential paper by Klump et al. (Factor Substitution and Factor-augmenting Technical Progress in the United States: a Normalized Supply-side System Approach 2007) on using a normalized CES supply-side system approach to estimate the value of the...

We design, pilot, and field a new survey of occupational skills in Peru, to investigate human capital differences between poor and rich countries. Though the average skill level is comparable, Peruvian jobs have markedly more uniform skill profiles than jobs in the US. However, matching...

We design, pilot, and field a new survey of occupational skills in Peru, to investigate human capital differences between poor and rich countries. Though the average skill level is comparable, Peruvian jobs have markedly more uniform skill profiles than jobs in the US. However, matching...

How much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling? We contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling. The advantage of our approach...

In this second contribution to the Symposium included in this volume on Future Productivity in Canada, Tiff Macklem of the Bank of Canada compares sources of recent productivity growth in Canada and the United States. Macklem sees aggregate labour productivity growth in Canada advancing at...

In an influential paper Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992) argue that the evidence on the international disparity in levels of per capita income and rates of growth is consistent with a standard Solow model, once it has been augmented to include human capital as an accumulable factor. In a study on...

Due to scarcity considerations an increase in the supply of college graduates should reduce the premium for this kind of qualification. Therefore it seems quite contradictory that a tremendous educational expansion in the USA is accompanied by rising wage dispersion (overall and between...