Introduction This paper examines whether the earnings of older US workers track overall increases in total factor productivity (TFP) as closely as those of their younger colleagues. The US population is aging: longevity is increasing, while fertility is, if anything, trending in the opposite direction. If the marginal product of younger workers rises proportionately with TFP but the marginal pr...

This paper studies the impact of the process of technological change on the distribution of productivities and pro...ts across sectors. We ...nd that if technological progress a¤ects high-tech and traditional sectors di¤erently, the impact of changes in the determinants of economic growth may differ depending on which is the actual change. When an economy is growing faster due to an increase in...

We apply a real options approach to develop a general characterization of the dynamics of the capital accumulation process in the presence of technological progress. In particular, we delineate circumstances under which the present technology represents a compound real option, which incorporates as valuable embedded options the opportunity of successive updating of the technology to superior fu...

Process Improvement has been used for decades as a means to become better and more efficient. Whilst many organizations have used considerable resources for process improvement, investments in process improvement have not always led to changes and improvements expected. One most important aspects of management is to motivate the work force. However, management often fails to deliver. In fact, b...

In active investment climates where firms sequentially improve each other’s products, a patent can terminate either because it expires or because a noninfringing innovation displaces its product in the market. We define the length of time until one of these happens as the effective patent life, and show how it depends on patent breadth. We distinguish lagging breadth, which protects against imi...

This paper develops a theoretical model to analyse how the arrival of a new technology embodied in capital affects the variability of earnings when workers’ adaptability to new technologies is subject to random events (luck) that can be history dependent. It is argued that technological change can leverage the importance of these stochastic factors and increase earnings instability in three way...

This paper proposes a stochastic model of investment with embodied technological progress, in which ...rms invest not only to expand the capacity as in Pindyck (1988) but also to replace old machines. The scrapping decision or the age of the oldest machine is then endogenous and evolves stochastically. Uncertainty increases the optimal age of the machines in use, and due to uncertainty, not onl...

We set up a theoretical framework to analyse the role of economic growth and technological progress in the erosion of social capital. Under certain conditions on parameters, the relationship between technological progress and social capital can take the shape of an inverted U curve. Furthermore, we show the circumstances that allow the economy to follow trajectories where the stock of social ca...