Directed Technical Change
Directed Technical Change
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DOI：
10.3386/w8287
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发表时间：
2001-05
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Acemoglu
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文献类型：
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作者：
D. Acemoglu
对于宏观经济学、发展经济学、劳动经济学和国际贸易中的许多问题来说，技术进步是否偏向于特定的因素是至关重要的。本文开发了一个简单的框架来分析形成这些偏见的力量。影响均衡偏差的主要因素有两个：价格效应和市场规模效应。前者鼓励针对稀缺要素的创新，后者则导致有利于丰富要素的技术变革。不同要素之间的替代弹性决定了这些影响的强度，这对技术变革和要素价格如何应对相对供给的变化具有影响。如果替代弹性足够大，对一种要素的长期相对需求就会上升。我应用这个框架来讨论一系列问题，包括：为什么过去60年的技术变革是技能偏向的，为什么技能偏向在过去25年里可能加速了。为什么在18世纪末和19世纪初引入的新技术是无技能偏见的？为什么有偏见的技术变革可能会扩大富国和穷国之间的收入差距。为什么国际贸易可能导致技能偏向的技术变革。为什么像20世纪70年代的欧洲大陆那样，大规模的工资推动可能会导致资本偏向的技术变革。为什么技术变革通常会增加劳动力而不是增加资本。
For many problems in macroeconomics, development economics, labor economics, and international trade, whether technical change is biased towards particular factors is of central importance. This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the forces that shape these biases. There are two major forces affecting equilibrium bias: the price effect and the market size effect. While the former encourages innovations directed at scarce factors, the latter leads to technical change favoring abundant factors. The elasticity of substitution between different factors regulates how powerful these effects are, and this has implications about how technical change and factor prices respond to changes in relative supplies. If the elasticity of substitution is sufficiently large, the long-run relative demand for a factor can slope up. I apply this framework to discuss a range of issues including: Why technical change over the past 60 years was skill-biased, and why the skill bias may have accelerated over the past twenty-five years. Why new technologies introduced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were unskill-biased. Why biased technical change may increase the income gap between rich and poor countries. Why international trade may induce skill-biased technical change. Why a large wage-push, as in continental Europe during the 1970s, may cause capital-biased technical change. Why technical change may be generally labor-augmenting rather than capital-augmenting.