The introduction and diffusion of personal computers are widely viewed as a technological revolution. Using U.S. metropolitan area–level panel data, this paper asks whether links between PC adoption, educational attainment, and the return to skill conform to a model of technological...

The positive correlations found between computer use and human capital are often interpreted as evidence that the adoption of computers have raised the relative demand for skilled labor, the widely touted skill-biased technological change hypothesis. However, several models argue the skill-...

It is often asserted that a highly educated workforce is vital to improving the competitive position of American businesses, especially by boosting entrepreneurship. To examine this contention, we use population Census data and a new panel data of startup firms, to examine how the education and...

Male-female wage gaps declined significantly over the 1980s and 1990s, while returns to education increased. In this paper, we use cross-city data to explore whether, like the return to education, the change in the gender wage gap may reflect changes in skill prices induced by the diffusion of...

We examine the relationship between investments in information technology (IT) and retail firm performance. We use untapped firm and establishment micro data from the Censuses of Retail Trade and the Assets and Expenditures Survey. We show that large firms account for most retail IT investment,...

This Economic Letter summarizes several papers presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Applied Microeconomics Summer Conference, held June 25-27, 2008. The papers are listed at the end and are available at http://www.frbsf.org/economics/conferences/0806/index.html ; The...