This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political ...power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.
We study the effects of industrial robots on US labor markets. We show theoretically that robots may reduce employment and wages and that their local impacts can be estimated using variation in ...exposure to robots—defined from industry-level advances in robotics and local industry employment. We estimate robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones. We also show that areas most exposed to robots after 1990 do not exhibit any differential trends before then, and robots’ impact is distinct from other capital and technologies. One more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment-to-population ratio by 0.2 percentage points and wages by 0.42%.
The Race between Man and Machine Acemoglu, Daron; Restrepo, Pascual
The American economic review,
06/2018, Letnik:
108, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which ...labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a static version where capital is fixed and technology is exogenous, automation reduces employment and the labor share, and may even reduce wages, while the creation of new tasks has the opposite effects. Our full model endogenizes capital accumulation and the direction of research toward automation and the creation of new tasks. If the long-run rental rate of capital relative to the wage is sufficiently low, the long-run equilibrium involves automation of all tasks. Otherwise, there exists a stable balanced growth path in which the two types of innovations go hand-in-hand. Stability is a consequence of the fact that automation reduces the cost of producing using labor, and thus discourages further automation and encourages the creation of new tasks. In an extension with heterogeneous skills, we show that inequality increases during transitions driven both by faster automation and the introduction of new tasks, and characterize the conditions under which inequality stabilizes in the long run.
Automation and New Tasks Acemoglu, Daron; Restrepo, Pascual
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2019, Letnik:
33, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We present a framework for understanding the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on labor demand, and use it to interpret changes in US employment over the recent past. At ...the center of our framework is the allocation of tasks to capital and labor—the task content of production. Automation, which enables capital to replace labor in tasks it was previously engaged in, shifts the task content of production against labor because of a displacement effect. As a result, automation always reduces the labor share in value added and may reduce labor demand even as it raises productivity. The effects of automation are counterbalanced by the creation of new tasks in which labor has a comparative advantage. The introduction of new tasks changes the task content of production in favor of labor because of a reinstatement effect, and always raises the labor share and labor demand. We show how the role of changes in the task content of production—due to automation and new tasks—can be inferred from industry-level data. Our empirical decomposition suggests that the slower growth of employment over the last three decades is accounted for by an acceleration in the displacement effect, especially in manufacturing, a weaker reinstatement effect, and slower growth of productivity than in previous decades.
Demographics and Automation Acemoglu, Daron; Restrepo, Pascual
The Review of economic studies,
01/2022, Letnik:
89, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract
We argue theoretically and document empirically that aging leads to greater (industrial) automation, because it creates a shortage of middle-aged workers specializing in manual production ...tasks. We show that demographic change is associated with greater adoption of robots and other automation technologies across countries and with more robotics-related activities across U.S. commuting zones. We also document more automation innovation in countries undergoing faster aging. Our directed technological change model predicts that the response of automation technologies to aging should be more pronounced in industries that rely more on middle-aged workers and those that present greater opportunities for automation and that productivity should improve and the labor share should decline relatively in industries that are more amenable to automation. The evidence supports all four of these predictions.
Several recent theories emphasize the negative effects of an aging population on economic growth, either because of the lower labor force participation and productivity of older workers or because ...aging will create an excess of savings over desired investment, leading to secular stagnation. We show that there is no such negative relationship in the data. If anything, countries experiencing more rapid aging have grown more in recent decades. We suggest that this counterintuitive finding might reflect the more rapid adoption of automation technologies in countries undergoing more pronounced demographic changes and provide evidence and theoretical underpinnings for this argument.
Innovation, Reallocation, and Growth Acemoglu, Daron; Akcigit, Ufuk; Alp, Harun ...
The American economic review,
11/2018, Letnik:
108, Številka:
11
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We build a model of firm-level innovation, productivity growth, and reallocation featuring endogenous entry and exit. A new and central economic force is the selection between high- and low-type ...firms, which differ in terms of their innovative capacity. We estimate the parameters of the model using US Census microdata on firm-level output, R&D, and patenting. The model provides a good fit to the dynamics of firm entry and exit, output, and R&D. Taxing the continued operation of incumbents can lead to sizable gains (of the order of 1.4 percent improvement in welfare) by encouraging exit of less productive firms and freeing up skilled labor to be used for R&D by high-type incumbents. Subsidies to the R&D of incumbents do not achieve this objective because they encourage the survival and expansion of low-type firms.
The Environment and Directed Technical Change Acemoglu, Daron; Aghion, Philippe; Bursztyn, Leonardo ...
The American economic review,
02/2012, Letnik:
102, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper introduces endogenous and directed technical change in a growth model with environmental constraints. The final good is produced from "dirty" and "clean" inputs. We show that: (i) when ...inputs are sufficiently substitutable, sustainable growth can be achieved with temporary taxes/subsidies that redirect innovation toward clean inputs; (ii) optimal policy involves both "carbon taxes" and research subsidies, avoiding excessive use of carbon taxes; (iii) delay in intervention is costly, as it later necessitates a longer transition phase with slow growth; and (iv) use of an exhaustible resource in dirty input production helps the switch to clean innovation under laissez-faire.
Using a multisector general equilibrium model, we show that the interplay of idiosyncratic microeconomic shocks and sectoral heterogeneity results in systematic departures in the likelihood of large ...economic downturns relative to what is implied by the normal distribution. Such departures can emerge even though GDP fluctuations are approximately normally distributed away from the tails, highlighting the different nature of large economic downturns from regular business-cycle fluctuations. We further demonstrate the special role of input-output linkages in generating tail comovements, whereby large recessions involve not only significant GDP contractions, but also large simultaneous declines across a wide range of industries.
PDF
