Effects of Learning-by-doing, technology-adoption costs and wage inequality

Rui Leite and Oscar Afonso

FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto

Abstract: In the dominant literature, the technological-knowledge bias that drives wage inequality is determined by the market-size channel. We develop an endogenous growth model with two technologies in which: a specific quality of labour, low or high-skilled, is combined with a specific set of quality-adjusted intermediate goods; the market-size channel is practically removed; adoption costs and learning-by-doing are linked with labour endowments. By solving transitional dynamics numerically, we show that changes in the supply of labour affect learning-by-doing and technology-adoption costs, which, in turn, influence the technological-knowledge bias and thus wage inequality. The proposed mechanisms can accommodate facts not explained by the previous literature.

Keywords: Learning-by-doing; Adoption costs; Technological-knowledge bias; Wage inequality; Numerical simulations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 J31 O31 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-dev, nep-hrm, nep-knm and nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.04.07_wp272.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.04.07_wp272.pdf [302 Found]--> https://fep.up.pt/investigacao/workingpapers/08.04.07_wp272.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:por:fepwps:272

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in FEP Working Papers from Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Economia do Porto Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().