Wage Inequality, R&D Labor and R&D Productivity

This paper examines the transitional dynamics of an R&D-based endogenous growth model with heterogeneous labor and explains the post-war comovement of three variables in the U.S. economy: the skill premium, the share of labor devoted to R&D and the growth rate of labor productivity. This paper provides a complete dynamic analysis of the model. We argue that the changing distribution of high skilled workers between sectors may have played an important role in explaining the U.S. skill premium movement, and we show that the transitional dynamics initiated by the structural change (possibly the decrease in R&D productivity in the late 1960s) can explain the comovement of the three variables.