The distribution of human capital and income lies at the center of a nexus of forces that shape a country’s economic, institutional and technological structure. I develop here a unified model to analyze these interactions and their growth consequences. Five main issues are addressed. First, I...

We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer [Romer, P. (1990). “Endogenous technological change”. Journal of Political Economy 98, 71–102]. In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect...

This paper surveys the experience of economic growth in the 20th century with a focus on technological change at the frontier together with issues related to success and failure in catch-up growth. A detailed account of growth performance based on historical national accounts data is given and...

This paper analyzes the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and energy demand. We construct a comprehensive cross-country cross-industry panel data set covering 13 years, 10 OECD countries, and 27 industries. Using up to 2889 country-industry observations, we find...

This paper analyses the theoretical issues related to the measurement of labour content in the context of general technologies with heterogeneous labour. A novel axiomatic framework is used in order to formulate the key properties of the notion of labour content and analyse its theoretical...

This paper analyses the theoretical issues related to the measurement of labour content in the context of general technologies with heterogeneous labour. A novel axiomatic framework is used in order to formulate the key properties of the notion of labour content and analyse its theoretical...

Job polarization the rise in employment shares of high and low skill jobs at the expense of middle skill jobs occurred in the US not just recently, but also in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that in each case polarization resulted from increased automation, and...

How do firms respond to technological advances that facilitate the automation of tasks? Which tasks will they automate, and what types of worker will be replaced as a result? We present a model that distinguishes between a task's engineering complexity and its training requirements. When two...

The role of farm size has recently come to the forefront of agricultural development debates. Agricultural development policy often focuses on small farms given evidence of their role in poverty reduction and of higher yields. Yet policy has also focused on large farms due to their share of...

Technical progress affects early retirement in two opposing ways. On the one hand, it increases real wages and thus produces an incentive to postpone retirement. On the other hand, it erodes workers' skills, making early retirement more likely. We re-examine the effect of technical progress on...