Relief should look beyond the immediate medical emergency and toward new policy that would spark manufacturing, here.
Productivity
June 22, 2020
Labor productivity growth during the U.K.'s Industrial Revolution averaged below 0.4 percent from 1770 to 1830, and only gradually increased to about 0.8 percent in 1860.
May 26, 2020
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.
May 11, 2020
The automation of manufacturing industries is a major public concern due to the salience of layoffs that are directly attributed to robot adoption. But closer analysis of automation’s impacts generally reveals that these fears are overblown.
April 20, 2020
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.
April 6, 2020
Relief should look beyond the immediate medical emergency and toward new policy that would spark manufacturing, here.
March 30, 2020
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.
March 23, 2020
Demand for H-1B visas, which allow U.S. firms to recruit high-skilled foreign workers, has dramatically exceeded the supply—there were 200,000 applications in 2019 for the 85,000 visas that were available.
March 9, 2020
The expansion of railroads across the United States in the late 1800s dramatically increased interconnections between communities, allowing businesses to reach new markets and incentivizing more efficient resource allocation. These effects are particularly salient today, given that the adoption of broadband has played a very similar role in the modern economy.
March 2, 2020
The growth of artificial intelligence has stoked fears that industries beyond manufacturing could be significantly automated. This underscores the need to study the evidence about modern automation, especially because the facts frequently contradict common concerns.
January 21, 2020
By the end of the Cold War, West Germany’s productivity was 3.6 times larger than East Germany’s. Utilizing the complete set of industrial information provided to East Germany between 1970 and 1989 by informants in West Germany, researchers have estimated that East Germany’s productivity would have been 10.3 percent lower in 1989 without this espionage.