The effects of technological innovations on employment : a new explanation

This paper investigates principally the effects of a technological innovation on hours worked in a sticky price model. Our challenge is to reproduce the short-run decline in employment supported by a large range of recent works, inspired by Gali (1999), regardless of any monetary policy consideration. The model simulations concern the postwar U.S. economy under two different monetary policy : an exogenous rule targeting money supply and a simple Taylor rule. The most interesting result is that the introduction of an input-output production structure counterbalances the full-accommodation of a technological innovation when monetary policy is governed by a Taylor rule, by (i) providing the model with more price rigidities ; (ii) inducing a substitution effect between intermediate goods and labor input for plausible values of intermediate inputs share.