When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation?
By Daron Acemoglu. Journal of Political Economy, 2010
367 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper studies whether labor scarcity encourages technological advances, that is, technology adoption or innovation, for example, as claimed by Habakkuk in the context of nineteenth-century United States. I define technology as strongly labor saving if technological advances reduce the marginal product of labor and as strongly labor complementary if they increase it. I show that labor scarcity encourages technological advances if technology is strongly labor saving and will discourage them if technology is strongly labor complementary. I also show that technology can be strongly labor saving in plausible environments but not in many canonical macroeconomic models.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30fbc4ab0f4e500c58563a1c7712c783b09f588d
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In Economics and Econometrics
- Daron Acemoglu
- Philippe Aghion
- David Hémous
- P. Restrepo
- M. Olsen
- Jacopo Ponticelli
- Leonardo Bursztyn
- P. Bustos
Citations in the corpus
- Demographics and Automation (2021, positive): “We now endogenize these technologies using an approach similar to Acemoglu (2007, 2010).”
- The Rise of the Machines: Automation, Horizontal Innovation, and Income Inequality (2014, positive): “More recently, Autor, Katz, and Kearney (2006, 2008) and Autor and Dorn (2013), amongst others, show that whereas income inequality has continued to increase above the median, there has been a reversal below the median.”
- Agricultural Productivity and Structural Transformation. Evidence (2016, background): “(19)See Neary (1981) and Acemoglu (2010) for more general discussions of the properties of technical change that reduces the marginal product of labor.”
- The Environment and Directed Technical Change (2012, background): “More recently, Gans (2009) develops a two-period model based on Acemoglu (2009b) to discuss the Porter hypothesis, that environmental regulation can lead to faster technological progress (see also Rauscher, 2009).”
- Robots at Work (2015, neutral): “References ACEMOGLU, D. (2010): “When Does Labor Scarcity Encourage Innovation?,” Journal of Political Economy, 118(6), 1037 – 1078.”
- Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings. NBER Working Paper No. 16082. (2010, neutral): “See , for example , Champernowne ( 1963 ) , Zeira ( 1998 , 2006 ) , Hellwig and Irmen ( 2001 ) and Acemoglu ( 2009 ) .”