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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

13. Technological Progress, Employment and the Lifetime of Capital

Authors : Raouf Boucekkine, Natali Hritonenko, Yuri Yatsenko

Published in: Sunspots and Non-Linear Dynamics

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

We study the impact of technological progress on the level of employment in a vintage capital model where: (i) capital and labor are gross complementary; (ii) labor supply is endogenous and indivisible; (iii) there is full employment, and (iv) the rate of labor-saving technological progress is endogenous. We characterize the stationary distributions of vintage capital goods and the corresponding equilibrium values for employment and capital lifetime. It is shown that both variables are non-monotonic functions of technological progress indicators. Technological accelerations are found to increase employment provided innovations are not too radical.

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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
Needless to say, the price at t of a unit of vintage \(\uptau \), P(t,\(\uptau \)), is not equal to 1 if \(\uptau < \text {t}\) as this price should reflect the decreasing pattern of quasi-rents associated to the use of these vintages due to obsolescence. See Solow et al. (1966), p. 99.
 
2
A typical example of these dynamics can be found in Boucekkine et al. (1997).
 
3
For brevity, we will omit the expression “at large t” when using the notation \(f(t) \approx g(t)\).
 
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Metadata
Title
Technological Progress, Employment and the Lifetime of Capital
Authors
Raouf Boucekkine
Natali Hritonenko
Yuri Yatsenko
Copyright Year
2017
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44076-7_13