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基本説明
Discusses the conditions under which skill-biased technical change may reduce the wages of the least skilled.
Full Description
Karl Marx predicted a world in which technical innovation would increasingly devalue and impoverish workers, but other economists thought the opposite, that it would lead to increased wages and living standards--and the economists were right. Yet in the last three decades, the market economy has been jeopardized by a worrying phenomenon: a rise in wage inequality that has left a substantial portion of the workforce worse off despite the continuing productivity growth enjoyed by the economy. Innovation and Inequality examines why. Studies have firmly established a link between this worrying trend and technical change, in particular the rise of new information technologies. In Innovation and Inequality, Gilles Saint-Paul provides a synthetic theoretical analysis of the most important mechanisms by which technical progress and innovation affect the distribution of income. He discusses the conditions under which skill-biased technical change may reduce the wages of the least skilled, and how improvements in information technology allow "superstars" to increase the scale of their activity at the expense of less talented workers.
He shows how the structure of demand changes as the economy becomes wealthier, in ways that may potentially harm the poorest segments of the workforce and economy. An essential text for graduate students and an indispensable resource for researchers, Innovation and Inequality reveals how different categories of workers gain or lose from innovation, and how that gain or loss crucially depends on the nature of the innovation.
Contents
Introduction vii Chapter 1: Which Tools Do We Need? 1 1.1 Production and Factor Prices 2 1.2 Factor Prices and Income Distribution 6 1.3 Factor Accumulation 11 1.4 Endogenous Technical Change 15 Chapter 2: Productivity and Wages in Neoclassical Growth Models 23 2.1 The Short Run 25 2.2 The Long Run 26 2.3 Conclusion 31 Chapter 3: Heterogeneous Labor 32 3.1 Skill-Biased Technical Progress 32 3.2 Capital-Skill Complementarity 35 3.3 Unbalanced Growth 38 3.4 Conclusion 41 Chapter 4: Competing Technologies 42 4.1 Learning the New Technology Is Costly 43 4.2 The New Technology Has Different Factor Intensities 52 4.3 Asymmetric Technical Progress 54 4.4 Conclusion 56 Chapter 5: Supply Effects 57 5.1 Supply Effects and Competing Technologies 58 5.2 Induced Bias in Innovation 72 5.3 Conclusion 84 Chapter 6: Labor as a Quality Input: Skill Aggregation and Sectoral Segregation 85 6.1 Bundling and Pricing of Labor Market Characteristics 86 6.2 Conclusion 98 Chapter 7: The Economics of Superstars 99 7.1 A Simple Model 100 7.2 Occupational Choice and Displacement 103 7.3 Growth and the Allocation of Talent 108 7.4 Hierarchy and Span of Control 109 7.5 Conclusion 116 Chapter 8: Complementarities and Segregation by Skills 117 8.1 A Simple Model 117 8.2 Application: Household Income Inequality and Assortative Mating 125 8.3 Extension: Increasing Firm Size and the Number of Worker Types in Segregated Equilibria 127 8.4 Aggregating Individual Interactions 131 8.5 Conclusion 148 8.6 Appendix 148 Chapter 9: Demand Effects 152 9.1 The Isoelastic Benchmark 153 9.2 Nonhomothetic Utility 154 9.3 The Limited Needs Property 155 9.4 Dynamics: Growth and the Introduction of New Varieties 158 9.5 An Application to Globalization 163 9.6 Asymmetries between Goods 165 9.7 Conclusion 171 9.8 Appendix 172 Chapter 10: Nonhomothetic Preferences and the Distributive Effects of Innovation and Intellectual Property 174 10.1 The Social Welfare Problem 175 10.2 Second-Best Analysis: The Role of Intellectual Property 179 10.3 Conclusion 182 10.4 Appendix: Derivation of (10.11) 183 Epilogue 184 References 187
