Productivity

While economic policy should do more to reduce income inequality and Congress should seriously consider world-class worker training and adjustment assistance programs, our nation is doomed to second-class status if we cannot support all forms of productivity, including worker-replacing automation.

The changing rate of technological advancement is a large source of controversy, with fears of both acceleration and stagnation. A new paper has sought to examine more granularly where this growth is occurring, identifying 1,757 technology domains and assessing the importance of new patents in those domains from 1976 to 2015.

Emigration, especially of high-skilled workers, is often presumed to be a major problem for developing nations. However, emigrants can drive innovation in their home country by driving up the costs of wages, and thus the returns to labor-saving inventions. A new study supports this idea, comparing the rates of emigration and patenting between communities in Sweden in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It is widely presumed that agglomeration effects cause large cities to have large advantages in the innovative process. A new study tests this presumption by examining the proportion of patents filed in large metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2014 across 14 OECD countries.