Special Interests and Technological Change

Giorgio Bellettini and Gianmarco Ottaviano

No 2003.59, Working Papers from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei

Abstract: We study 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 overlapping generations and policy makers as a dynamic common agency problem, where competing generations invest a certain amount of resources to lobby either for the maintenance 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 demographic, technological and preference parameters.

Keywords: Technological change; Technology option; Pressure goups; Dynamic common agency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C73 D72 O38 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ino and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Special Interests and Technological Change (2005)
Working Paper: Special Interests and Technological change (1999)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fem:femwpa:2003.59

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