Innovation and Inequality :How Does Technical Progress Affect Workers?

Publication subTitle :How Does Technical Progress Affect Workers?

Author: Saint-Paul Gilles;;;  

Publisher: Princeton University Press‎

Publication year: 2008

E-ISBN: 9781400824779

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780691128306

Subject: F241.21 labour demand

Keyword: 经济学

Language: ENG

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Description

Karl Marx predicted a world in which technical innovation would increasingly devalue and impoverish workers, but other economists thought the opposite, that it would lead to increased wages and living standards--and the economists were right. Yet in the last three decades, the market economy has been jeopardized by a worrying phenomenon: a rise in wage inequality that has left a substantial portion of the workforce worse off despite the continuing productivity growth enjoyed by the economy. Innovation and Inequality examines why.

Studies have firmly established a link between this worrying trend and technical change, in particular the rise of new information technologies. In Innovation and Inequality, Gilles Saint-Paul provides a synthetic theoretical analysis of the most important mechanisms by which technical progress and innovation affect the distribution of income. He discusses the conditions under which skill-biased technical change may reduce the wages of the least skilled, and how improvements in information technology allow "superstars" to increase the scale of their activity at the expense of less talented workers. He shows how the structure of demand changes as the economy becomes wealthier, in ways that may potentially harm the poorest segments of the workforce and economy. An essential text for graduate students and an indispensable resource for researchers, Innovation and Inequality reveals how different categories of wor

Chapter

2 Productivity and Wages in Neoclassical Growth Models

2.1 The Short Run

2.2 The Long Run

2.3 Conclusion

3 Heterogeneous Labor

3.1 Skill-Biased Technical Progress

3.2 Capital–Skill Complementarity

3.3 Unbalanced Growth

3.4 Conclusion

4 Competing Technologies

4.1 Learning the New Technology Is Costly

4.2 The New Technology Has Di.erent Factor Intensities

4.3 Asymmetric Technical Progress

4.4 Conclusion

5 Supply Effects

5.1 Supply Effects and Competing Technologies

5.2 Induced Bias in Innovation

5.3 Conclusion

6 Labor as a Quality Input: Skill Aggregation and Sectoral Segregation

6.1 Bundling and Pricing of Labor Market Characteristics

6.2 Conclusion

7 The Economics of Superstars

7.1 A Simple Model

7.2 Occupational Choice and Displacement

7.3 Growth and the Allocation of Talent

7.4 Hierarchy and Span of Control

7.5 Conclusion

8 Complementarities and Segregation by Skills

8.1 A Simple Model

8.2 Application: Household Income Inequality and Assortative Mating

8.3 Extension: Increasing Firm Size and the Number of Worker Types in Segregated Equilibria

8.4 Aggregating Individual Interactions

8.5 Conclusion

8.6 Appendix

9 Demand Effects

9.1 The Isoelastic Benchmark

9.2 Nonhomothetic Utility

9.3 The Limited Needs Property

9.4 Dynamics: Growth and the Introduction of New Varieties

9.5 An Application to Globalization

9.6 Asymmetries between Goods

9.7 Conclusion

9.8 Appendix

10 Nonhomothetic Preferences and the Distributive Effects of Innovation and Intellectual Property

10.1 The Social Welfare Problem

10.2 Second-Best Analysis: The Role of Intellectual Property

10.3 Conclusion

10.4 Appendix: Derivation of (10.11)

Epilogue

References

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