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Working Paper
Skilled Tradable Services: The Transformation of U.S. High-Skill Labor Markets
We study a group of service industries that are skill-intensive, widely traded, and have recently seen explosive wage growth. Between 1980 and 2015, these ?Skilled Tradable Services? accounted for a sharply increasing share of employment among the highest earning Americans. Unlike any other sector, their wage growth was strongly biased toward the densest local labor markets and the highest paying firms. These services alone explain 30% of the increase in inequality between the 50th and 90th percentiles of the wage distribution. We offer an explanation for these patterns that highlights the ...
Working Paper
Adjusting to Robots: Worker-Level Evidence
We estimate the effect of industrial robots on employment, wages, and the composition of jobs in German labor markets between 1994 and 2014. We find that the adoption of industrial robots had no effect on total employment in local labor markets specializing in industries with high robot usage. Robot adoption led to job losses in manufacturing that were offset by gains in the business service sector. We analyze the impact on individual workers and find that robot adoption has not increased the risk of displacement for incumbent manufacturing workers. They stay with their original employer, and ...
Working Paper
Markets, Externalities, and the Dynamic Gains of Openness
Inflows of foreign knowledge are the key for developing countries to catch up with the world technology frontier. In this paper, I construct a simple tractable model to analyze (a) the incentives of foreign firms to bring their know-how to a developing country and (b) the incentives of domestic firms to invest in their own know-how, given the exposure to foreign ideas and competition. The model embeds two diffusion mechanisms typically considered separately in the literature: externalities and markets. The dynamic gains of openness can be substantial under either mechanism, but their relative ...
Working Paper
Openness and the Optimal Taxation of Foreign Know-How
Developing countries frequently offer tax incentives and even subsidize the entry and operation of foreign firms. I examine the optimality of such policies in an economy where growth is driven by entrepreneurial know-how, a skill that is continuously updated on the basis of the productive ideas implemented in the country. Openness allows foreign ideas to disseminate inside a country and can foster the country's domestic accumulation of know- how. With externalities, however, laissez-faire openness is suboptimal and can be growth-and even welfare-reducing. I examine the gains from openness ...
Working Paper
Knowledge Diffusion, Trade and Innovation across Countries and Sectors
We provide a unified framework for quantifying the cross country and cross-sector interactions among trade, innovation, and knowledge diffusion. We study the effect of trade liberalization in a multi-country, multi-sector endogenous growth model in which comparative advantage and the stock of knowledge are determined by innovation and diffusion. A reduction in trade costs induces a re-allocation of comparative advantage in production and innovation across sectors, which translates into higher growth along the counterfactual balanced growth path (BGP). Heterogeneous knowledge diffusion across ...
Working Paper
Knowledge Diffusion, Trade and Innovation across Countries and Sectors
We provide a unified framework for quantifying the cross-country and cross-sector interactions among trade, innovation, and knowledge diffusion. We study the effect of trade liberalization in an endogenous growth model in which comparative advantage and the stock of knowledge are determined by innovation and diffusion. We calibrate the model to match observed cross-country and cross-sector heterogeneity in production, innovation efficiency and knowledge spillovers. Our counterfactual analysis shows that a reduction in trade costs induces a re-allocation of R&D and comparative advantage across ...
Working Paper
Knowledge Diffusion, Trade and Innovation across Countries and Sectors
We provide a unified framework for quantifying the cross country and cross-sector interactions among trade, innovation, and knowledge diffusion. We study the effect of trade liberalization in a multi-country, multi-sector endogenous growth model in which comparative advantage and the stock of knowledge are determined by innovation and diffusion. A reduction in trade costs induces a re-allocation of comparative advantage in production and innovation across sectors, which translates into higher growth along the counterfactual balanced growth path (BGP). Heterogeneous knowledge diffusion across ...
Working Paper
International technology Diffusion: A Gravity Approach
This paper investigates, empirically, the determinants of international technology diffusion. To do that, I set up a multi-country model of innovation and diffusion with perfect enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). The model yields a gravity equation for bilateral royalty payments that is estimated using methods from empirical trade. I investigate discrepancies between model’s predictions and observed royalty payments to identify the role of fundamentals vs. other factors such as imperfect IPR protection. Fundamentals account for most of the variation in royalty payments, ...
Working Paper
What Drives International technology Diffusion? A Gravity Approach
We derive a theory-based gravity-type equation that determines the main drivers of international technology diffusion under perfect enforcement of intellectual property rights. We estimate the gravity equation using bilateral royalty payments data for a sample of 53 countries and the period 1995-2012 to infer the amount of technology diffusion predicted by the model. We then analyze differences between the model and the data, and find that they are mainly driven by characteristics of the importing-technology country that are not captured by the model. We explore the role of three channels: ...
Working Paper
Occupation Mobility, Human Capital and the Aggregate Consequences of Task-Biased Innovations
We construct a dynamic general equilibrium model with occupation mobility, human capital accumulation and endogenous assignment of workers to tasks to quantitatively assess the aggregate impact of automation and other task-biased technological innovations. We extend recent quantitative general equilibrium Roy models to a setting with dynamic occupational choices and human capital accumulation. We provide a set of conditions for the problem of workers to be written in recursive form and provide a sharp characterization for the optimal mobility of individual workers and for the aggregate supply ...