The Technology Cycle and Inequality

Motivated by the observed rise in the trade of technology, I analyse how technology would spread in a frictionless market. In such a world, low-skilled agents prefer to use old technology because it costs less; their skills do not justify the use of frontier technology. The model generates a technology-life cycle of somewhere between 68 and 124 years and per-capita income differential factors between 2.3 and 4.5. The model matches fairly well the cross-section relation between a country's income per capita and the average age of the technologies that its residents use. It is also consistent with aspects of the observed positive relation between income and imports of technology.