Tasks, Technology, and Factor Prices in the Neoclassical Production Sector

Andreas Irmen

No 8353, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper introduces tasks into the neoclassical production sector. Competitive firms choose the profit-maximizing amounts of factor-specific tasks that determine their factor demands and output supplies. We show that the effect of factor-augmenting technical change on relative and absolute factor prices can be decomposed into a productivity effect and a task-demand effect of opposite sign. These effects appear since the novel task-based approach distinguishes between the demands for tasks and the demands for factors. This perspective provides a new intuition for the emergence of relative and absolute factor biases and the role of the elasticity of substitution.

Keywords: technical change; factor prices; factor-specific tasks; neoclassical production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O33 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Tasks, technology, and factor prices in the neoclassical production sector (2020)
Working Paper: Tasks, Technology, and Factor Prices in the Neoclassical Production Sector (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8353

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