Does the sector bias of skill-biased technical change explain changing skill premia?

This paper shows the sector bias of skill-biased technical change (SBTC) can help explain changing skill premia within countries in recent decades. Our model demonstrates that in many cases it is the sector bias of SBTC that determines SBTC's effect on relative factor prices, not its factor bias. Rising (falling) skill premia are caused by SBTC that is concentrated in skill-intensive (unskill-intensive) sectors. Our empirical findings for ten OECD countries over the 1970s and 1980s are consistent with sector bias being important. In countries when skill premia were rising (falling), SBTC was generally concentrated in skill-intensive (unskill-intensive) sectors.     

Trade,skill-biased technical change and wages in Mexican manufacturing

This article looks at the relative importance of competing stories, particularly trade liberalization and skill-biased technical change, to explain changes in the skill premium and the real wages of unskilled and skilled workers in Mexican manufacturing using plant-level data. The channel through which technical change is observed is changes in the domestic price of machinery and equipment due to the availability of new and cheaper machines. The analysis also looks at trade-induced skill-biased technical change by taking into account changes in the price of machinery and equipment caused by changes in the tariff rate specific to machinery and equipment. Instrumental variables, including the price of machinery and equipment in the United States, are used to determine causality between the above effects and wages. Thus, the article provides evidence for some recent findings in the literature that link trade liberalization, skill-biased technical change occurring through technology embodied in machines and increases in the skill premium.     

Investment-specific technological change, skill accumulation, and wage inequality

Wage inequality between education groups in the United States has increased substantially since the early 1980s. The relative number of college-educated workers has also increased dramatically in the postwar period. This paper presents a unified framework where the dynamics of both skill accumulation and wage inequality arise as an equilibrium outcome driven by measured investment-specific technological change. Working through equipment–skill complementarity and endogenous skill accumulation, the model does well in capturing the steady growth in the relative quantity of skilled labor during the postwar period and the substantial rise in wage inequality after the early 1980s. Based on the calibrated model, we examine the quantitative effects of some hypothetical tax-policy reforms on skill accumulation, wage inequality, and welfare.     

Inflation,technological-knowledge bias,and wages

A detailed examination of wage data points to a wage polarization trend vis-à-vis the distribution of qualifications. Theoretically terms, this points to the need for modeling focused on the relevance of the direction of technological knowledge. To this end, we branched production into routine and non-routine tasks. In this way, the results produced positive relationships between the relative supply of skilled workers and the skill premium and between automation and wage polarization.     

Tradable and nontradable directed technical change

ABSTRACT

We wish to reconcile the major trends in wages and the terms of trade using a directed technical change approach in which: (i) tradable and nontradable goods can be substitutes or complements; and (ii) scale effects can be present or can be partially or totally removed. With a lower skilled labour ratio and a higher relative wage in the tradable sector, the price (real exchange rate or terms of trade) mechanism is crucial in determining sectoral productivity differences and thus wage inequality. Along the balanced growth path, the real exchange rate can be negatively related with the relative productivities in horizontal innovation (the Balassa-Samuelson effect) and with the relative labour level, depending on scale effects. The wage premium increases due to an increase in the relative labour level in the nontradable sector under substitutability with scale effects or under complementarity without scale effects. A calibrated version of the model indicates that the model closely replicates the data for Germany. Moreover, while the Balassa-Samuelson effect is quantified, an increase in the relative supply of labour in the tradable sector decreases both terms of trade and inequality.     

Labor's share fluctuations, biased technical change, and the business cycle

We extend the basic RBC model to allow for biased technical changes. One broad definition of biased technical changes is changes that directly affect factor elasticities. Given the link between changes in factor elasticities and factor shares, observed fluctuations in US labor's share are motivation for this study. We find that when the technology shock process is calibrated according to US labor's share dynamics, 93 percent of US GDP volatility is accounted for. The observed countercyclical nature of labor's share is accounted for, although the model correlation is too high. As well, the model exhibits business cycles that are qualitatively similar to those of the standard model with neutral technology shocks. These findings, while robust to the short-run properties of various measures of labor's share, are sensitive to the average labor's share used in calibration, e.g., departing from a baseline calibration value of 63 percent, for steady-state labor's shares of 50 percent and 70 percent the model accounts for 107 percent and 84 percent of US GDP volatility respectively.     

An analysis of the sources of technical change in the agricultural sector of Iran

A differential structural equation system including latent variables was applied for analyzing the sources of technical change in the agricultural sector of Iran, 1971–2005. The findings indicated that international knowledge spillover, human capital, and internal research and development expenditures have a significant role in technical progress in the agricultural sector of Iran. The findings showed that international knowledge spillover has been a more effective factor on the technical progress related to internal R&D. The technical progress was found out to be Hicks-neutral.     

The sequencing of reform in transition economies

In this paper, we examine the consequences of sequencing on the progress of reforms in transition economies. The paper uses panel logit models to determine whether or not progress in some reforms enhances the prospects for other reforms. We find that progress on small-scale privatization is associated with advances in several other reforms, perhaps because small-scale privatization creates lobbies for reform. Our estimations suggest that a comprehensive program of small-scale privatization is needed to stimulate large-scale privatization, trade, and banking reform in a country that has undertaken little reform. Moreover, if restructuring is to occur banking reform is necessary. We also find that relaxing the fiscal constraint stimulates large-scale privatization, restructuring, and trade reform. Finally, we find that negotiations about EU accession negotiations advance the transition but only in banking reform and competition policy. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 835–850.     

Analyzing skilled and unskilled labor efficiencies in the US

In this paper, I analyze the time paths of the efficiencies of skilled and unskilled labor in a production framework where skilled and unskilled labor are imperfect substitutes. Their implications for economic growth and wage inequality in the US between 1950 and 2005 present two main findings. First, although skilled labor efficiency has a strong upward trend, I find no evidence of acceleration in its growth rate to support the common view that there has been an acceleration in the new skilled-biased technologies. Second, beginning around 1970, there has been a decline in the absolute level of the efficiency of unskilled labor, implying that the decline has played a significant role in the overall productivity slowdown and the substantial widening in the US wage structure.     

Economic growth, skill-biased technical change and wage inequality: A model and estimations for the US and Europe

In recent literature skill-biased technical change has been viewed as a major cause for wage inequality. Some modelling and presentation of stylized facts have been undertaken for US time series data. A preliminary study of wage inequality in a model with knowledge as input in an aggregate production function has been presented by Riddell and Romer [General Purpose Technologies and Economic Growth, 1998, MIT Press]. Although some important forces determining wage inequality are widely accepted we know little about the quantitative impact of each source and differences across countries. We present a growth model of the Romer type with innovation-based technical change and two skill groups where the growth of knowledge, the relative supply of the two skill groups, externalities and substitution effects among the two groups are the driving forces for wage inequality. We undertake estimates for US time series data and contrast those estimates with results from some European countries. In particular, we compare parameter estimations for US and German time series data. The paper concludes that there is less wage inequality across skills in Europe in contrast to the US on the macroeconomic level. But, considering disaggregated data we observe some increases in inequality for Germany, too. Although our model reveals important variables for the explanation of wage inequality there may, however, also be other factors, such as trade unions, which have impacted the wage spread.     

Geography,geopolitics, and policy in the performance of transition economies

The economic performance of the transition economies as of 2015 is well explained by three variables: (1) years of membership in the EU; (2) physical distance from the heart of the EU economy, taken to be Dusseldorf; and (3) annual revenues from oil and gas production, reflecting natural resource deposits. These three factors account for around 86 percent of the variation in per capita income across the 28 transition economies, and reflect the interplay of domestic policy, geopolitics, geography and natural resources.     

Structure and performance of the service sector in transition economies1

This paper examines the performance of the service sector in the Eastern European transition economies during the 1997–2004 period. The performance of the service sector as a whole and of its sub‐sectors is very heterogeneous within the region. Service sub‐sectors that are information and communications technology producers or users and those using skilled labour more intensively exhibit the highest labour productivity growth. Our estimates show a positive and significant effect of liberalization on service labour productivity growth that is stronger for sub‐sectors that are more distant from the technological frontier. Service liberalization is also shown to have a positive effect on labour productivity levels and growth of downstream manufacturing industries.     

Economies of density, scale and scope in the water supply and sewerage sector: a study of four developing and transition economies

Using panel data, we estimate measures of density, scale and scope economies in four countries that differ substantially in their levels of economic development and in their piped water and sewerage coverage: Brazil, Moldova, Romania and Vietnam. We find evidence of economies of scale in Moldova, Romania and Vietnam. In Brazil, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of constant returns to scale. The results of this study show that the cost structure of water and sewerage utilities varies significantly within and between countries and over time.      

The impact of institutional volatility on financial volatility in transition economies

What have been the determinants of financial volatility in the transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? This paper posits that institutional changes, and in particular the volatility of crucial institutions such as property rights, have been the major causes of financial volatility in transition. Building a unique monthly database of 20 transition economies from 1991 to 2017, this paper applies the GARCH family of models to examine financial volatility as a function of institutional volatility. The results show that more advanced institutions help to dampen financial sector volatility, while institutional volatility feeds through directly to financial sector volatility in transition. Democratic changes in particular engender much higher levels of volatility, while property rights are sensitive to the metric used for their measurement.     

Trend shifts in the forward premium and the predictability of excess returns in currency markets

This article provides evidence that the forward premium involves structural changes in the trend function, which might affect the predictability of currency excess returns to be dependent on the choice of the sample period. Accounting for the shifts in trend for the forward premium reveals that currency excess returns for the Canadian dollar, Swiss franc, euro and pound against the US dollar are significantly predictable irrespective of the sample period selected. Another advantage of detrending the forward premium is that we can obtain more consistent slope coefficient estimates in the predictive regression, which enables us to make more consistent, dependable inferences about the excess return predictability.     

Real wages and labor-saving technical change: evidence from a panel of manufacturing industries in mature and labor-surplus economies

Recent theories have provided a persuasive account of a key stylized fact of mature economies: the common long-run trends of average real wages and labor productivity, and the ensuing stationarity of functional distribution. Central to these theories is the notion of directed technical change, which claims that a rise in labor costs sparks the adoption of labor-saving innovations. This paper empirically examines a core prediction of these theories, namely that shocks to functional distribution elicit compensatory adjustments in real product wages and labor productivity. Using two disaggregated data-sets of manufacturing industries (EU-Klems and Unido), I find evidence of cointegration and two-way, long-run Granger causality between these two variables. These findings suggest that directed technical change is indeed key for producing stationarity in functional distribution, and they complement the recent empirical literature on distributive cycles and productivity growth. Preliminary evidence from the Unido data-set also suggests the importance of directed technical change in developing countries. To illuminate the empirical procedure, I present a theoretical model of growth and distribution with directed technical change.     

CPI bias and real living standards in Russia during the transition

The economies of the former Soviet Bloc experienced large declines in output during the decade of transition which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet there are many reasons to believe that measured output and official deflators provide a poor proxy for the change in real living standards in transition economies. This paper uses the Engel curve methodology developed by Hamilton [Hamilton, B. 2001. “Using Engel's Law to Estimate CPI Bias” American Economic Review 91(3): 619–630] to examine changes in real living standards in Russia during the transition period and to provide an estimate of how much the official Russian CPI has overstated consumer inflation. We also examine changes in consumer durables, home production, and subjective well-being to further evaluate changes in living standards. Our findings indicate that CPI bias has caused a substantial understatement of the growth performance of the Russian economy during the transition. Even just allowing household final consumption to be deflated with bias, we find that the level of real per capita GDP in 2001 may be understated by up to 30% compared with using a bias-corrected deflator. Our analysis of consumer durables, home production, and subjective well-being supports the conclusion that the decline in living standards has been substantially less than what is inferred by looking at official statistics on real output.     

Seize the state, seize the day: state capture and influence in transition economies

Data from the 1999 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey is used to examine state capture and influence in transition economies. We find that a capture economy has emerged in many transition countries, where rent-generating advantages are sold by public officials and politicians to private firms. While influence is a legacy of the past inherited by large, incumbent firms with existing ties to the state, state capture is a strategic choice made primarily by large de novo firms competing against influential incumbents. Captor firms, in high-capture economies, enjoy private advantages in terms of more protection of their own property rights and superior firm performance. Despite the private gains to captor firms, state capture is associated at the aggregate level with social costs in the form of weaker economy-wide firm performance. Journal of Comparative Economics 31 (4) (2003) 751–773.