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Working Paper
Transitional dynamics of output and factor income shares: lessons from East Germany
I evaluate the quantitative implications of technology change and government policies for output and factor income shares during East Germany's transition since 1990. I model an economy that gains access to a high productivity technology embodied in new plants. As existing low productivity plants decrease production, the capital income share varies due to variation in the profit share of these plants. Two policies - transfers and government-mandated wage increases - have opposite effects on output growth, but both contribute to reducing the capital share during the transition. The model's ...
Conference Paper
Innovation in non-bank payment systems: remarks
Working Paper
Frictionless technology diffusion: the case of tractors
Empirical evidence suggests that there is a long lag between the time a new technology is introduced and the time at which it is widely adopted. The conventional wisdom is that this fact is inconsistent with the predictions of the frictionless neoclassical model. In this paper we study the specific case of the diffusion of the tractor in American agriculture between 1910 and 1960. There are three important driving forces: changes in quality, wage rates and prices of substitutes such as horses and mules. We demonstrate that once these exogenous forces are taken into account, the standard ...
Working Paper
Signaling effects of monetary policy
We develop a DSGE model in which the policy rate signals the central bank's view about macroeconomic developments to incompletely informed price setters. The model is estimated with likelihood methods on a U.S. data set including the Survey of Professional Forecasters as a measure of price setters' expectations. The signaling effects of monetary policy are found to be empirically important and dampen the effects of monetary disturbances on inflation. While the signaling effects enhance the Federal Reserve's ability to stabilize the economy in the face of demand shocks, they play a small role ...
Working Paper
Do technological improvements in the manufacturing sector raise or lower employment?
We find that technology's effect on employment varies greatly across manufacturing industries. Some industries exhibit a temporary reduction in employment in response to a permanent increase in TFP, whereas far more industries exhibit an employment increase in response to a permanent TFP shock. This raises serious questions about existing work that finds that a labor productivity shock has a strong negative effect on employment. There are tantalizing and interesting differences between TFP and labor productivity. We argue that TFP is a more natural measure of technology because labor ...
Working Paper
The delayed response to a technology shock: a flexible price explanation
I present empirical evidence of how the U.S. economy, including per-capita hours worked, responds to a technology shock. In particular, I present results based on permanent changes to a constructed direct measure of technological change for U.S. manufacturing industries. Based on empirical evidence, some claim that hours worked declines and never recovers in response to a positive technology shock. This paper's empirical evidence suggests that emphasizing the drop in hours worked is misdirected. Because the sharp drop in hours is not present here, the emphasis rather should be on the small ...
Journal Article
The role of colleges and universities in building local human capital
Colleges and universities can contribute to the economic success of a region by deepening the skills and knowledge?or human capital?of its residents. Producing graduates who join the region?s educated workforce is one way these institutions increase human capital levels. In addition, the knowledge and technologies created through research activities at area universities may not only attract new firms to a region but also help existing businesses expand and innovate. These ?spillover effects? can in turn raise the region?s demand for high-skilled workers.
Working Paper
Technology diffusion and postwar growth
In the aftermath of WorldWar II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies. This acceleration is correlated with the incidence of U.S. economic aid and technical assistance in the same period. We interpret this as supportive of the interpretation that technology transfers from the U.S. to Western European countries and Japan were an important factor in driving growth in these ...
Working Paper
The transition to a new economy after the Second Industrial Revolution
During the Second Industrial Revolution, 1860?1900, many new technologies, including electricity, were invented. These inventions launched a transition to a new economy, a period of about 70 years of ongoing, rapid technical change. After this revolution began, however, several decades passed before measured productivity growth increased. This delay is paradoxical from the point of view of the standard growth model. Historians hypothesize that this delay was due to the slow diffusion of new technologies among manufacturing plants together with the ongoing learning in plants after the new ...
Journal Article
New technology may cause stock volatility