Special Interests and Technological change

Giorgio Bellettini and Gianmarco Ottaviano

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: We model an OLG economy where productivity growth comes from two alternative sources: process innovation and learning-by-doing. There is a trade-off between the two in so far as frequent technological updates reduce the scope for learning on existing technologies. A conflict is shown to arise between the young and the old, because the former favor innovation while the latter prefer learning. We model the interaction between different generations and short-lived policy makers as a dynamic common agency problem, where competing generations invest a certain amount of resources to lobby either for the maintainance of the current technology or the adoption of a new one. By focusing on truthful Markov perfect equilibria, we characterize the political equilibrium and show its dependence on the underlying technological parameters.

Date: 1999-02
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/4969/1/340.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Special Interests and Technological Change (2005)
Working Paper: Special Interests and Technological Change (2003)
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:bol:bodewp:340

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().