computer use and earnings in britain this paper estimates various models of the effect of computer use on earnings using recent ncds data the cross section estimates are large and significant while the standard fixed effects estimates are small or insignificant the panel estimates change considerably once we allow the coefficients to differ across individuals conditional on assumptions about when individuals use computers conventional panel estimates may not identify the crucial parameters and alternative methods are needed we conclude that there was a substantial premium associated with computer use for some individuals in the uk

wages sorting on skill and the racial composition of jobs wages for black and white workers are substantially lower in occupations with a high density of black employees following standard controls such correlations can exist absent discrimination or as a result of discrimination in wage level equations partial correlations fall sharply after controlling for occupational skills longitudinal estimates accounting for worker heterogeneity indicate little wage change associated with changes in racial composition results support a quality sorting rather than discrimination explanation with racial density serving as an index of unmeasured skills discrimination reflected in racial wage gaps occurs within occupations or across occupations in a manner uncorrelated with racial composition

if not computers then what returns to computer use in the uk revisited in recent years much attention has been paid to the effect on wages of skill biased technology especially the use of computers although empirical studies have shown a positive relationship between computer use and earnings doubts have been cast on whether this is a causal relationship or merely represents unobserved other factors which are themselves positively linked to computer usage this study provides evidence that computers themselves raise wages although their impact on wages falls as other controls are included in the regression it still remains significant whilst the effect of another proxy for unobserved factors becomes insignificant furthermore improvements in computer use have an additional impact on earnings supporting the productivity interpretation

two stage group rent seeking with negatively interdependent preferences the purpose of this paper is to compare the rate of rent dissipation in a group rent seeking contest in which rent seeking activities take place in two stages with those of a one stage individual contest specifically the effect of the extension by introducing rent seekers with negatively interdependent preferences is analyzed focusing on the relationship between contest structure and preference type we find that rent dissipation given absolute as opposed to relative payoff maximization is lower in a two stage contest than in a one stage contest given players with negatively interdependent preferences we find the reverse

the labour market in the new information economy the extension of information and communication technologies to economic activity is changing the labour market in important ways this article shows that computerization and use of the internet are associated with greater hours worked as well as higher wages that it occupations are rapidly increasing their share of employment that job search and recruitment are moving rapidly to the web with consequences for matching employers and employees and possibly most important of all that trade unions have begun to use the internet as a tool for servicing members and carrying their message to the public raising the possibility of a major change in the nature of the union movement

returns to foreign languages of native workers in the european union most of the literature on returns to languages is concerned with immigrants the authors study which uses the european community household panel survey for the period 1994 2001 infers returns to non native languages by native workers in nine countries of the european union the study differs from other studies that deal with the same issue in three respects first instead of using a dummy for each language they use the ratio of the population not proficient in a given country s national language and compare the results with the more traditional approach using dummies second they correct for time independent measurement errors in self reporting and find that the resulting iv estimates are much larger than those obtained by ols they also suggest that there is little room for time persistent errors and heterogeneity and that therefore their estimates should suffer ostensibly little from unobserved ability biases finally they estimate iv quantile regressions to illustrate how returns to languages vary at different points of the distribution of earnings

evidence on new technologies and wage inequality in france using individual data from the french labour force survey and the complementary survey on working conditions for 1998 we analyse earnings inequalities along the wage distribution between workers using novel information and communication technologies ict at their job and those not using them we estimate quantile regressions with technological dummies and carry out a decomposition analysis both at the aggregate level and by occupations at the aggregate level most of the wage gap between both populations is explained by the divergence in their labour characteristics in jobs where ict are not very diffused the technological premium is larger than in jobs characterized by a large presence of novel technologies whereas in the former type of jobs the technological premium is mainly justified by a divergence in the labour market characteristics between ict users and nonusers in positions characterized by a wide presence of novel technologies the technological premium responds rather to a divergence in

two stage rent seeking contests with carryovers we examine a two stage contest in which players in twogroups compete noncooperatively to win a rent in thefirst stage each group selects a finalist the twofinalists compete for the rent in the second stage first stage efforts are carried over to the secondstage in the sense that they are partly effective inthe second stage as well we show the following inthe case of player specific carryovers therent dissipation rate increases in the carryover rate with the carryover rate equal to one the rent isfully dissipated in the case of group specificcarryovers however the rent dissipation rate isindependent of the carryover rate

can the mortensen pissarides model with productivity changes explain u s wage inequality this article examines whether the mortensen pissarides matching model with productivity changes can explain the time pattern of wage inequality the main finding is that the model produces counterfactual results the main source of failure seems to be the exogenous matching function and or the exogenous surplus share neither of which allows firms to use wage policies to direct workers searches

free entry and efficient rent seeking this paper concerns rent seeking and the extent to which rents are dissipated under various circumstances gordon tullock s 1967 insight that expenditures made to capture an artificially created transfer represent a social waste suggested that the cost to the economy of monopoly and regulation is greater than the simple harberger 1954 deadweight loss indeed under tullock s original formulation and in the extensions of his work by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 rents are exactly dissipated at the social level 1 is spent to capture 1 so that the total welfare loss from such activities is equal to the harberger triangle plus the rectangle of monopoly profits

dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders the theory of rent seeking with its origins in the observations of gordon tullock 1967 or to use jagdish bhagwati s 1982 proposed term the theory of directly unproductive profit seeking activities is concerned with the potentially adverse effects on resource allocation of incentives to cap ture and defend artificially contrived rents and transfers the scope for so cial loss proposed by the theory derives from the relation between the value of a contestable prize and the value of the resources attracted into the con test to determine the beneficiary of the prize underlying this social loss is a specification of how rational behavior by optimizing agents links the value of the prize sought to the resources expended it has been traditional to assume competitive behavior in describing the activities of lobbying and influence seeking then if some further condi tions are satisfied l the total value of the resources expended precisely equals the value of the prize sought so dissipation is complete 2 conse quently the social cost associated with contestability of a rent can be in ferred from the value of the rent itself and the detailed and hard to come by information on individual outlays made in the course of the contest be comes unnecessary by basing their analyses on competitive dissipation contributors to the rent seeking literature see the review by robert tollison 1982 have been able to presume that the observed value of a contested rent is an exact measure of the associated social cost of monopoly power or regu lation similarly in the trade theoretic literature where the rights contested are to quota premia or revenues from trade taxes krueger 1974 bhagwati

a model of rivalries with endogenous prize and strength abstract this paper extends bevia and corchon 2013 to a model with both endogenous contestable prize and endogenous relative strength such a setting is ideal for the study of intra organizational rivalries commonly observed in family sports promotion and duopoly we find that when the game starts with asymmetric players the weaker player exerts more effort than the stronger player as a result the weaker player partially overcomes the disadvantage of being weak in this setting neither domino nor avalanche effect exists

technology and the wage structure this article reports direct evidence on how technological change is related to changes in wage gaps by schooling experience and gender wage gaps by schooling increased the most in industries with rising r d intensity and accelerating growth in the capital labor ratio estimates of their relationship to high tech capital are inconclusive contrary to popular notions that technological change harms older workers wage growth of experienced workers is much greater in r d intensive industries than in industries with little r d activity the gender gap narrowed more in industries that most intensively used high tech capital in 1979

rent seeking and entry abstract it is the purpose of this paper to develop a market equilibrium model of rent seeking with entry the model determines the optimal amount of rent seeking activities by individuals the equilibrium number of rent seekers and hence also the total amount of rent seeking in the industry

employment transitions and computer use of older workers in our work we study the role of information and communication technology ict skills and their utilization in the retirement decision we provide empirical evidence based on italian panel data in favour of the hypothesis that ceteris paribus better educated male employees with ict know how retire later such effect is stronger the longer the time horizon considered and its magnitude is remarkably larger than the one observed in us and germany in previous studies we also document that ict do not play a crucial role in the retirement decision of women our results are robust to the estimation strategy adopted

computer use and wages evidence from taiwan we find a significant positive relationship between computer use and wages using taiwan microdata controlling for endogeneity of computer use with simultaneous equations suggests that although ols estimates are biased upward workplace computer use increases productivity d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

asymmetric two stage group rent seeking comparison of two contest structures two variations of a two stage rent seeking contest areconsidered in the first stage of the between groupmodel groups compete through the expenditure of resources bytheir members based on group expenditures one winning groupis probabilistically determined on the second stage membersof the winning group compete with one another for an exogenousprize in the semi finals model a player is chosen fromeach group and then these players compete for the prize groups differ in size or in their valuation of the prize subgame perfect equilibrium solutions are constructed forthese two contest structures

social contacts and occupational choice social contacts help workers to find jobs but those jobs need not be in the occupations where workers are most productive hence social contacts can generate mismatch between a worker s occupational choice and his comparative productive advantage thus economies with dense social networks can exhibit apparently low labor force quality and as a result low returns to firms investment and depressed aggregate productivity we employ us and european data for the 1990 s to test the key prediction that social contacts distort workers occupational choices in a direction that reduces their apparent productivity we find that the use of social contacts helps find jobs one to two months sooner but leads to individual wage discounts of 5 to 7 and produces negative externalities on aggregate productivity

offshoring tasks and the skill wage pattern the paper investigates the relationship between offshoring wages and the occupational task profile using rich individual level panel data our main results suggest that when only considering within industry changes in offshoring we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low skilled workers though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision however when allowing for cross industry effects of offshoring i e allowing for labor mobility across industries negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers occupations a higher degree of interactivity and in particular non routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring

dynamic multi activity contests in many contests players can influence the outcome through efforts in multiple activities several of which can be chosen before others in this paper we develop a model of dynamic multi activity contests players simultaneously choose efforts in long run activities observe each other s efforts in these activities and then simultaneously choose efforts in short run activities a player s long run and short run efforts complement each other in determining the player s probability of winning we compare the outcomes of this two stage model to those of the corresponding model in which players do not observe each other s first stage efforts before the second stage and thus effectively choose efforts in all activities simultaneously interestingly effort expenditures are always lower in the sequential multi activity contest than in the simultaneous multi activity contest the implications of this result for the organization of military litigation innovation academic and sporting contests are highlighted

endogenous sharing rules in collective group rent seeking this paper examines the possibility of endogenous determination of intra group sharing rules in a collective group rent seeking game collective group rent seeking is considered as a two stage nash cournot game in which sharing rules are determined prior to individual decision on voluntary contribution the solution is subgame perfect and is obtained by backward induction in competition between two groups of the same size the nash equilibrium sharing rule of each group is to distribute rent to each according to relative effort total rent seeking outlays in this case are equal to those obtained by tullock 1980 when more than two groups compete for a rent the sharing rule based on relative effort is again likely to be the nash equilibrium strategy of each group the amount of total rent seeking outlays is also equal to that in tullock 1980 in a nutshell the rent is substantially dissipated if sharing rules are endogenously determined

computers skills and wages computer technology is most prominently used by skilled high wage workers this suggests that computer use requires skills to take full advantage of the possibilities which are particularly present among relatively skilled workers this article develops a simple technology adoption model showing that the decision to adopt computer technology depends on i the tasks to be performed ii the level of skill or education and iii the level of wages applying this model to british data it is shown that the effect of wages and particular tasks on computer adoption is larger than the effect of skills on adoption the estimates suggest that in britain computer use is likely to be a matter of cost efficiency and not so much of workers skills

employer skill demands and labor market outcomes of blacks and women the author uses data from a 1992 94 survey of employers in four metropolitan areas to investigate the effects of skill demands as measured by hiring requirements and job tasks on the wages and employment of newly hired workers skill demands were generally associated with lower employment of blacks than whites and with higher employment of women than men most tasks and requirements had statistically significant positive effects on starting hourly wages together these effects help to account for some of the differences between the hourly wages of white and black men and for some of the trends over time in the relative wages and employment of race and gender groups

collective rent dissipation the theory of rent seeking was initiated by tullock 1967 1980 followed by krueger 1974 and posner 1975 and more recently extended in various directions by allard 1988 appelbaum and katz 1986a b c gradstein and nitzan 1989 hillman and katz 1984 1987 hillman and samet 1987 hillman and riley 1989 katz et al 1990 long and vousden 1987 ursprung 1990 and varian 1989 the purpose of this paper is to extend this theory by introducing the possibility of collective group rent seeking with voluntary individual decisions regarding their extent of participation in the collective rent seeking efforts

returning to the returns to computer use this paper re examines the returns to computer use using a new matched workplace employee data from canada we control for potential selection using instrumental variables results suggest that it is not merely the employee having a computer on his desk but rather having complementary computer skills that causes wages to increase this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

symmetric two stage contests with budget constraints the impact of a budget constraint on individual expenditures is examined in two models of two stage contests with homogenous and risk neutral players competing to win a single indivisible commonly valued rent the set of players is partitioned into equally sized groups in the first model one contestant from each group survives to compete on the second stage against the other survivors in the second model one group survives the first stage and its members compete against each other on the second stage we derive and discuss the symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium solution for each model

computerisation and wage dispersion an analytical reinterpretation the rich countries have recently seen a dramatic rise in income inequality all the more surprising because the long term trend had been toward equality this paper examines one of the leading explanations computerisation in the workplace i offer a theory of computers impact on white collar work which goes far toward explaining the timing form and locus of recent labour market changes the theory looks at the bureaucratic and organisational applications of computers that have been first largest and most influential they have two effects on firms demand for labour at different skill levels

levels of computer self efficacy computer use and earnings in china abstract levels of self efficacy in computer use were found to be positively related to computer use at work among a sample of workers in shanghai the simultaneous estimation of computer use and earnings indicated that an earnings premium for computer use accrues only to females not to males

what happens when agent t gets a computer the labor market impact of cost efficient computer adoption this paper offers a model of how computer technology has changed the labor market demonstrating that wage differentials between computer users and non users are consistent with computers first being introduced in high wage jobs following cost efficiency furthermore skill upgrading occurs following a reemphasis on non routine tasks after adoption the model also reveals that neither differences in computer skills nor complementary skills are needed to explain wage differentials between users and non users skill upgrading and the changing organization and intensity of work finally the predicted effects on the wage structure are consistent with empirical evidence

local labor force education new business characteristics and firm performance it is often asserted that a highly educated workforce is vital to improving the competitive position of american businesses especially by boosting entrepreneurship to examine this contention we use population census data and a new panel data of startup firms to examine how the education and skill level of the local labor force are related to the creation and success of new businesses this paper studies relationship between education entrepreneurship and businesses outcomes and considers simultaneously both the education of the entrepreneur and of the workforce where the entrepreneurs operate their businesses consistent with this simultaneous focus our initial results indicate that more educated entrepreneurs tend to be located in metropolitan areas with more educated workforces moreover highly educated areas have above average entrepreneurship rates finally the level of education of entrepreneurs is strongly related to positive business outcomes especially for college graduates compared to those with less than a four year degree

general education vocational education and labor market outcomes over the life cycle policy proposals promoting vocational education focus on the school to work transition but with technological change gains in youth employment may be offset by less adaptability and diminished employment later in life to test for this tradeoff we employ a difference in differences approach that compares employment rates across different ages for people with general and vocational education using microdata for 11 countries from ials we find strong and robust support for such a tradeoff especially in countries emphasizing apprenticeship programs german microcensus data and austrian administrative data confirm the results for within occupational group analysis and for exogenous variation from plant closures respectively

do marital status and computer usage really change the wage structure this analysis uses several identification strategies and data sources to control for individual ability and determine the causal effect of marital status and computer usage on wages although data from the cps nlsy and a data set of identical twins show that there are large cross sectional effects of these variables new econometric specifications are applied to these data which indicate that marital status and computer usage are not important causal determinants of earnings even after adjustments are made for measurement error and within twin differences in ability

endogeneity computers language skills and wages among university graduates in vietnam one would expect that returns to supplementary skills in developing countries are considerably higher compared to those documented for developed countries as is the case with returns to schooling i derive estimates of returns to the use of computer and foreign language skills in vietnam after controlling for endogeneity using a binary instrument hypothesized to reflect reconstruction doi moi policies in vietnam i find that a the use of both computers and language skills is associated with very large earnings premiums b iv return estimates are as high as and sometimes higher than ols estimates however they should be interpreted in relation to the instrument used

experimental comparison of multi stage and one stage contests this article experimentally studies a two stage elimination contest and compares its performance with a one stage contest contrary to the theory the two stage contest generates higher revenue than the equivalent one stage contest there is significant over dissipation in both stages of the two stage contest and experience diminishes over dissipation in the first stage but not in the second stage our experiment provides evidence that winning is a component in a subject s utility a simple behavioral model that accounts for a non monetary utility of winning can explain significant over dissipation in both contests it can also explain why the two stage contest generates higher revenue than the equivalent one stage contest

new technologies wages and worker selection we study the effect of new technologies nt on wages and employment using a unique panel that matches data on individuals and on their firms as in the united states we show that computer users are better paid than nonusers 15 20 more but these workers were already better compensated before the introduction of the nts total returns to computer use amount to 2 measurement errors do not affect our estimates furthermore computer users are protected from job losses as long as bad business conditions do not last too long this result holds even after controlling for possible selection biases

the immigrant and native born wage distributions evidence from united states censuses recent studies document a large widening of the immigrant native born mean wage gap since about 1970 a trend that some observers ascribe to post 1965 changes in u s immigration policy these studies are limited however by their exclusive focus on men which ignores important gender differences in the wage gap and by the inadequacy of the mean wage for characterizing the gap when as in recent decades the wage distribution dramatically changes this study of recent immigrants examines changes across the entire wage distribution for both genders the authors find evidence based partly on gender differences that minimum wages strongly influenced the gap a counterfactual analysis also indicates that if recent immigrants in 1970 had faced the 1990 wage structure their wage distribution would have closely resembled that of recent immigrants in 1990 these and other results suggest that the increasing wage gap is linked to changes in the wage structure

the effects of human resource management on small firms productivity and employees wages this paper analyses whether employees and firms differently benefit from particular human resource hr practices the focus is on small firms that may be badly informed on the impact of hr practices on firm performance in this study on dutch pharmacies it is found that firms do not reward employees skills according to their contribution to firms productivity as 1 employees are over rewarded for their sector specific skills and under rewarded for the productivity enhancing effect of their computer skills and 2 employees work experience positively affects their wages but does not have real productivity effects moreover it is found that training employees in case of vacancy problems seems to be an adequate hr practice since it increases productivity without affecting the average wage level the opposite holds for offering higher wages to newly recruited employees furthermore we find that only the employees benefit from performance evaluation interviews whereas employing many employees by tem

rent seeking with non identical sharing rules the primary object of this paper is to examine the role of differential sharing rules within a collective rent seeking setting on the possible non existence of nash equilibrium focusing on groups that distribute part of the rent equally among their members and the residual according to relative effort we show that in rent seeking societies applying the two polar sharing rules equilibrium never exists in the general case where groups apply different but not necessarily the polar sharing rules we study the relationship between group variability in distributing rents and the problem of non existence of equilibrium in the rent seeking game

make money surfing the web the impact of internet use on the earnings of u s workers much research on the digital divide presumes that adults who do not use the internet are economically disadvantaged yet little research has tested this premise after discussing several mechanisms that might produce differences in earnings growth between workers who do and do not use the internet we use data from the current population survey to examine the impact of internet use on changes in earnings over 13 month intervals at the end of the internet boom our analyses reveal robustly significant positive associations between web use and earnings growth indicating that some skills and behaviors associated with internet use were rewarded by the labor market consistent with human capital theory current use at work had the strongest effect on earnings in contrast to economic theory which has led economists to focus exclusively on effects of contemporaneous workplace technology use workers who used the internet only at home also did better suggesting that users may have benefited from superior

the payoff to skill in the third industrial revolution1 is the third industrial revolution indeed driven by rising payoffs to skill this simple but important question has gone unanswered because conventional models of earnings inequality are based on exceedingly weak measurements of skill by attaching occupational skill measurements to the 1979 2010 current population surveys it becomes possible to adjudicate competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive creative technical and social skill the well known increase in between occupation inequality is fully explained when such skills are taken into account while returns to schooling prove to be quite stable once correlated changes in workplace skills are parsed out the most important trend however is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to synthesis critical thinking and related analytic skills the payoff to technical and creative skills often touted in discussions of the third industrial revolution is shown to be less substantial

robots computers and the gender wage gap abstract we analyze the effects of two automation technologies industrial robots and computing equipment on the gender wage gap in us local labor markets between 1990 and 2015 we find distinct impact of robot and computer capital an increase in robots decreases male wage more than female wage whereas an increase in computers reduces female wage more than male wage according to our estimates one additional unit of robot per thousand workers reduces gender wage gap by 0 3 log points and by contrast an increase in computer capital by one million dollars per thousand workers increases gender wage gap by 4 1 log points

the personal computer and entrepreneurship in contrast to the large and rapidly growing literature on information technology it investments and firm productivity we know very little about the role of personal computers in business creation using matched data from the 19972001 computer and internet usage supplements to subsequent outgoing rotation group files from the current population survey cps i explore the relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship trends over the past two decades provide some evidence of a positive relationship between home computers and entrepreneurship rates but the evidence is not clear in contrast an analysis of the relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship at the individual level provides evidence that individuals who had access to a home computer are substantially more likely to become entrepreneurs over the following 1215 months probit and bivariate probit regressions also provide evidence of a strong positive relationship between computer ownership and entrepreneurship among women but only limited evidence for men further estimates from the cps indicate that entrepreneurs who had prior access to home computers create a large variety of types of businesses and not only those in the it industry

skill biased technological change and wage inequality evidence from a plant retooling1 one of the most popular explanations for the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low skill workers this pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages over the same period this article reports on a case study of the retooling of a food processing plant a unique longitudinal multimethod design reveals the nature of the technological change the changes in job requirements and the mechanisms by which the changes affect the wage distribution for hourly production workers this research finds that indeed the retooling resulted in greater wage dispersion and that the changes have also been associated with greater racial inequality in wages however contrary to the claims of advocates of the skill bias hypothesis organizational and human resources factors strongly mediated the impact of the changing technology absent these high road organizational choices th

group contests with internal conflict and power asymmetry we investigate simultaneous inter and intra group conflict in the shadow of within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members group conflict efforts a more symmetric group faces a higher degree of internal conflict and might expend more effort in external conflict when the group conflict effort technology is highly complementary depending on the degree of complementarity the stronger player s relative contribution to external conflict might be higher in a more asymmetric group and as a result it is possible for the weaker player to earn a higher payoff in the absence of any complementarity the rent dissipation is non monotonic with the within group power asymmetry

home computer use and the development of human capital this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes by exploiting a voucher program in romania our main results indicate that home computers have both positive and negative effects on the development of human capital children who won a voucher to purchase a computer had significantly lower school grades but show improved computer skills there is also some evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive skills as measured by raven s progressive matrices we do not find much evidence for an effect on non cognitive outcomes parental rules regarding homework and computer use attenuate the effects of computer ownership suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors

opening the box information technology work practices and wages using 1994 95 survey data on customer service representatives in 303 u s bank branches the authors investigate the effects on wages of information technology it of work practices and of those two factors in combination offline high involvement practices measured by the presence of quality circles were related positively to wages as was more extensive use of it that supports sales efforts where it was used more extensively to automate routine processes wages were lower in branches that did not have high involvement work practices the effects are partially explained by higher education requirements and more extensive introductory training in higher wage jobs

what is a public sector pension worth we measure accruals in defined benefit db pension plans for public and private sector workers in britain using typical differences in scheme rules and sector specific lifetime age wage profiles by sex and educational group we show not just that coverage by db pension plans is greater in the public sector but that median pension accruals as a percentage of salary are more than 6 higher among db covered public sector workers than covered private sector workers this is largely driven by earlier normal pension retirement ages but also by differences in earnings profiles across the sectors

the returns to computer use revisited have pencils changed the wage structure too are the large measured wage differentials for on the job computer use a true return to computer skills or do they just reflect that higher wage workers use computers on their jobs we examine this issue with three large cross sectional surveys from germany first we confirm that the estimated wage differential associated with computer use in germany is very similar to the u s differential second we also measure large differentials for on the job use of calculators telephones pens or pencils or for those who work while sitting down we argue that these findings cast some doubt on the literal interpretation of the computer use wage differential as reflecting true returns to computer use or skill

the diffusion of computers and the distribution of wages abstract when the costs are decreasing workers adopt technology at the point where the costs equal the increased productivity output per worker increases immediately while productivity benefits increase only gradually if costs continue to fall as a result workers in computer adopting labor market groups experience an immediate fall in wages due to increased supply on the other hand adopting workers experience wage increases with some delay this model explains why increased computer use does not immediately lead to higher wage inequality more specifically the results of the model are shown to be consistent with the question why within group wage inequality among skilled workers as a result of computer technology adoption in the united states increased in the 1970s while between group wage inequality and within group wage inequality among the unskilled did not start to increase until the 1980s the model also predicts that the more compressed german wage structure leads to a lagged diffusion of computer technology along with smaller changes in wage inequality our empirical analysis suggests that this is consistent with the actual developments in germany since the 1980s finally the theoretical predictions seem to be of the right magnitude to explain the empirical quantities observed in the data

the impact of advanced technology adoption on wage structures evidence from taiwan manufacturing firms we examine the impact of advanced technology adoption on wage and employment structures in taiwan using a survey of manufacturing firms that provides direct information on the use of advanced technologies we find that firms using more advanced technologies pay higher wages to both non production and production workers and employ higher fractions of non production workers controlling for the possible endogeneity of technology adoption suggests that the estimated impact of new technologies on wages is downward biased and that the effect on production workers wages may be minimal

returns from computer use a simple test on the productivity interpretation abstract this paper finds that returns from computer use do not vary with the intensity of computer use this is evidence against the productivity interpretation of these returns and supports the view that returns from computer use can be attributed to unobserved heterogeneity

how organizational structure can reduce rent seeking in multi tiered organizations individuals can engage in unproductive rent seeking activities both within and between the divisions of the organization nevertheless a multi tiered organizational structure can induce efficiency gains by decreasing rent seeking we present a model of production and simultaneous internal and external rent seeking assuming a logistic contest success function in equilibrium there is generically either internal or external rent seeking but not both a multi tiered organization leads to less rent seeking and higher welfare even though the production technology gives no reason for any specific organizational structure our findings constitute a new efficiency rationale for multi tiered organizations

offshoring the nature of tasks and occupational stability empirical evidence for germany using a large administrative data set of individual employment histories for germany this paper studies the relationship between offshoring and the individual risk of leaving the occupation moreover a rich data set on tasks performed in occupations is used to better characterise the sources of worker vulnerability both material and service offshoring are on average not associated with an increase in occupational outflow rates however this association depends on the nature of tasks performed in the occupation higher intensities of interactive and in particular non routine tasks are associated with a larger decrease or a smaller increase in the occupational hazard rate

r versus d estimating the differentiated effect of research and development on innovation results r d is considered to be the main source of innovation we argue that r d is too broad a measure including activities differing in purposes culture people management and other features however empirical studies have not analyzed them separately mainly due to the lack of data using firm level data the aim of this paper is to estimate the differentiated effect of research and development on different innovation outputs results show that both research and development activities are important however we find that development activities are more important for product innovation while the effect of research activities is higher on process innovation moreover we analyze differences by technological intensity of the sector when analyzing product and process innovations we find evidence supporting the existence of higher payoffs to development and especially to research in low tech sectors when compared with high tech ones

liquidity constraints and the formation of unbalanced contests abstract we analyze the effects of future liquidity constraints on contestants investment in a dynamic contest model contestants invest in two consecutive contests to win a prize in each period the loser of the first period contest can be liquidity constrained in the second period due to too little remaining wealth the winner of the first contest can reinvest the prize in the second contest we show that future liquidity constraints mainly affect the imbalance of the contest in the future but not today surprisingly larger contest prizes decrease contestants future investments and amplify the imbalance of future contests however the contest organizer can reduce this imbalance by increasing the share of the prize money in the second contest