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Modeling the transition to a new economy: lessons from two technological revolutions

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Author Info
Andrew Atkeson
Patrick J. Kehoe

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Abstract

Many view the period after the Second Industrial Revolution as a paradigmatic example of a transition to a new economy following a technological revolution and conjecture that this historical experience is useful for understanding other transitions, including that after the Information Technology Revolution. We build a model of diffusion and growth to study transitions. We quantify the learning process in our model using data on the life cycle of U.S. manufacturing plants. This model accounts quantitatively for the productivity paradox, the slow diffusion of new technologies, and the ongoing investment in old technologies after the Second Industrial Revolution. The main lesson from our model for the Information Technology Revolution is that the nature of transition following a technological revolution depends on the historical context: transition and diffusion are slow only if agents have built up through learning a large amount of knowledge about old technologies before the transition begins.

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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in its series Staff Report with number 296.

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Date of creation: 2006
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Publication status: Published in American Economic Review> (Vol. 97, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 64-88)
Handle: RePEc:fip:fedmsr:296

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Keywords: Technological innovations;

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  7. Timothy F. Bresnahan & Erik Brynjolfsson & Lorin M. Hitt, 2002. "Information Technology, Workplace Organization, And The Demand For Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 117(1), pages 339-376, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Klaus Desmet & Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, 2007. "Spatial Growth and Industry Age," NBER Working Papers 13302, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  2. Daniel Schiess & Roger Wehrli, 2008. "The Calm Before the Storm? - Anticipating the Arrival of General Purpose Technologies," CER-ETH Economics working paper series 08/81, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich. [Downloadable!]
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