研讨论文

The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment

论文作者：Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

发表信息：American Economic Review 2018, 108(6): 1488–1542

主讲人

朱景明

时间

2月11日18:30~21:30

地点

腾讯会议 842-290-126

点评老师

王忏、明洋

活动对象

创新发展学院研究生

论文摘要

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.