Innovative workplace practices based on multi-tasking and ICT that have been diffusing in most OECD countries since the 1990s have strong consequences on working conditions. Available data show together with the emergence of new organizational forms like multi-tasking, the increase in the...

This paper derives the optimal pace of capital accumulation at the firm level and the corresponding investment dynamics in the presence of an energy-saving technological progress. Energy and capital are complementary. When technical progress is disembodied, the firm invests once at the first...

In this paper, an endogenous growth model is built up incorporating Schumpeterian growth and embodied technological progress. Under embodiment, long run growth is affected by the following effects : (i) obsolescence costs add to the user cost of capital, reducing the research effort; and (ii)...

In this paper, we study the properties of optimal growth models à la Nelson and Phelps (1966) where the labor resources of an economy can be allocated freely either to production, technology adoption or capital maintenance. We first characterize the balanced growth paths of a benchmark model...

This paper studies the conditions under which an IT revolution may endogenously occur. To this end, we construct an endogenous growth multisectoral model with a preeminent IT sector. Technological progress is embodied : New softwares can only be run on the most recent generations and hardware....

In this paper, we introduce adoption costs in a canonical vintage capital model. Adoption costs take the form of a direct loss in production during a fixed period of time. We explicitly characterize the optimal machine replacement policy as a function of the adoption period. Using an explicit...

We explore the hypothesis that demographic changes started in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are at the root of the acceleration in growth rates at the dawn of the modern age. During this period, life tables for Geneva and Venice show a decline in adult mortality; French marriage...

The productivity slowdown faced by the US economy since the first oil shock has been associated with a rise in the decline rate of the relative price of equipment and a reduction in the rate of disembodied technical change. We build up a growth model in which learning-by-doing is the engine of...

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an overlapping generations model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to enter the labor market and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of...

A benchmark AK optimal growth model with maintenance expenditures and endogeneous utilization of capital is considered within an explicit vintage capital framework. Scrapping is endogenous, and the model allows for a clean distinction between age and usage dependent capital depreciation and...