Return of the Solow Paradox? It, Productivity, and Employment in U.S. Manufacturing

By Daron Acemoglu, David H. Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Brendan M. Price. Social Science Research Network, 2014

327 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some limited support for more rapid productivity growth in IT-intensive industries depending on the exact measures, though not since the late 1990s. Most challenging to this paradigm, and our expectations, is that output contracts in IT-intensive industries relative to the rest of manufacturing. Productivity increases, when detectable, result from the even faster declines in employment.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e54300b186bdd17a643504525795fe15a294daa9

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Citations in the corpus

Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s (2015, unknown): “We view these results as consistent with a mounting body of evidence that computer-producing industries have an outsized influence on measured output and productivity in the manufacturing sector (Houseman, Bartik, and Sturgeon 2015; Acemoglu et al. 2014b).”
Robots at Work (2015, unknown): “But recent work on the United States finds that gains in productivity are concentrated in ICT-producing industries, not in ICT-using industries (Acemoglu et al., 2014).”
Robots Are Us: Some Economics of Human Replacement (2015, unknown): “The stock of code At grows according to, At = δAt−1 + zHA,t, (3) 6”
Is this time different? How digitalization influences job creation and destruction (2019, background): “…not be surprising, given that previous studies have found that ICT investment does not have major impacts on either employment or productivity (e.g. Acemoglu et al., 2014; Chen and Xie, 2015).18 The change in total employment is significant positively associated with an increase in high- and…”
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Multidisciplinary perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy (2019, background): “…however has remained nar-rowly focused on the question of skills and whether human and AI are substitutes or complements on the labour market (Acemoglu, Autor, Dorn, Hanson, & Price, 2014; Autor, 2013; Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 2000; Frey & Osborne, 2017; Genz, Lehmer, & Janser, 2018; Katz &…”
Skill Gaps, Skill Shortages, and Skill Mismatches (2015, background): “…has the inexorable effect of creating job losses through increases in productivity in industries and occupations where it is used (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011) is a powerful idea, but the relationships among IT use, productivity, and job loss change considerably over time (Acemoglu et al. 2014).”
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and Work (2018, unknown): “5 This discussion also implies that, in contrast to the popular emphasis on the negative labor market consequences of “brilliant” and highly productive new technologies set to replace labor (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014; Ford 2016), the real danger for labor may come not from highly productive”