This paper tries to explain why a certain type of technology is skill-biased. In contrast with existing literature, this paper regards skilled workers as overhead labour, and presents a model wherein skilled workers constitute a fixed input, required to produce a new product. The demand for...

Technological innovation is a fundamental driver of economic growth and human progress. Yet some critics want to deny the vast benefits that innovation has bestowed and continues to bestow on mankind. To inform policy discussions and address the technology critics' concerns, this paper...

An influential hypothesis explaining the persistence of global productivity differences is that frontier technologies are finely tuned to the local conditions of the high-income countries that develop them and inappropriate for application elsewhere. This paper studies how environmental...

In this paper I calibrate unobserved labor-generated knowledge spillovers within and between six large macroeconomic sectors covering the U.S. civilian economy from 1948 to 1991. Using quality-adjusted data I show that manufacturing and trade & transportation are the main source of knowledge...

Aum, Lee, and Shin (2018) quantify the impact of production complementarities and differential productivity growth across occupations and sectors on the slowdown of aggregate productivity growth. This note expands their work to study substitutability between new computer equipment and labor in...

A consensus in the growth literature is that scale effects of R&D are non-existent across mature industrialized economies. However, the scrutiny across emerging economies is lacklustre at best. The empirical studies of scale effects also leave the issues of unbalanced regression (non-standard...

We develop measures of labor-saving and labor-augmenting technology exposure using textual analysis of patents and job tasks. Using US administrative data, we show that both measures negatively predict earnings growth of individual incumbent workers. While labor-saving technologies predict...

This paper identifies and analyses some key challenges that OECD and partner economies may face over the coming 50 years if underlying global trends relating to growth, trade, inequality and environmental pressures prevail. For example, global growth is likely to slow and become increasingly...

We analyze social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model in which available technologies have correlated payoffs. Each generation experiments within a set of policies whose payoffs are initially unknown and drawn from the path of a Brownian motion with drift. Marginal...

Evolutionary and environmental economics have a potentially close relationship. This paper reviews past and identifies potential applications of evolutionary concepts and methods to environmental economics. This covers a number of themes: resource use and ecosystem management; growth and...