This paper examines the impact of technological innovation on wages using a panel of UK manufacturing firms. We utilize a headcount measure of major innovations between 1945-83 combined with share price and accounting information. Innovating firms are found to have higher average wages, but rival innovation tends to depress own wages. This appears consistent with a model where wages are partly determined by a sharing in the rents generated by innovation. In other words innovation may be a good instrument for proxies for rents such as profitability, quasi-rents or Tobin's q. Instrumental variable estimates of the elasticity between wages and quasi-rents are about 0.3, remarkably close to the recent findings of Abowd and Lemieux (1993).
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
1071.
Find related papers by JEL classification: J51 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - Trade Unions: Objectives, Structure, and Effects O33 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Technological Change - - - Technological Change: Choices and Consequences; Diffusion Processes
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