Quarterly Journal of Economics articles from November 1998

Quarterly Journal of Economics archives from November 1998

Are medical prices declining? Evidence from heart attack treatments.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The difficulties of deriving accurate price indices for service industries are well-known [Griliches 1992]. In this paper we address the issue of appropriate price indices for medical care. We focus on medical care because...

Appropriate technology and growth.
November 1, 1998... Do all countries in the world use the same technology? Many would view even the posing of this question as absurd. In India, fields are harvested by bands of sweating workers, bending to use their scythes. In the United States one farmer does...

Why do new technologies complement skills? Directed technical change and wage inequality.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION In the 1970s college graduates earned 55 percent more than high school graduates. This premium fell to 41 percent in 1980, but then increased to 62 percent in 1995 [Autor, Katz, and Krueger 1998]. One explanation for the...

Workers, machines, and economic growth.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Economists usually view technological innovations as new methods of production, which enable producers to increase output without increasing inputs. This is equivalent to saying that technological innovations enable...

Measuring the social return to R&D.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Do advanced economies engage in too much or too little R&D?(1) By how much does private investment in research differ from optimal investment? Given the central role of R&D as an engine of growth, these questions have...

Patent buyouts: a mechanism for encouraging innovation.
November 1, 1998... Economic growth ultimately depends on the production of new ideas, but competitive markets do not provide appropriate incentives for the production of ideas. If consumers pay only the marginal cost of transmitting ideas, revenues will be...

Computing inequality: have computers changed the labor market?
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Overall wage inequality and educational wage differentials have expanded substantially in the United States since the late 1970s. Increases in the growth rate of the relative demand for more-skilled workers driven by a...

Technology and changes in skill structure: evidence from seven OECD countries.(Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION The structure of wages and employment has dramatically shifted in many countries in recent years. There have been big increases in wage inequality in the United States and in the United Kingdom, while other countries...

Implications of skill-based technological change: international evidence.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION Less-skilled workers have suffered reduced relative wages, increased unemployment, and sometimes both in OECD economies over the 1980s. In the United States real wages of young men with twelve or fewer years of education...

Skilled labor-augmenting technical progress in U.S. manufacturing.
November 1, 1998... I. INTRODUCTION There is increasing evidence that the last 25 years have witnessed a dramatic change in the way goods are produced. During this period firms began to replace relatively unskilled workers by skilled workers and equipment at...