The authors develop a model of costly technology adoption where the cost is irrecoverable and fixed. Households must decide when to switch from an existing technology to a new, more productive technology. Using a recursive approach, the authors show that there is a unique threshold level of wealth above which households will adopt the new technology and below which they will not. This threshold is independent of preference parameters and depends only on technology parameters. Prior to adoption, households invest at increasing rates, but consumption growth is constant. The authors also show that richer households adopt sooner and that income inequality increases over time. Both these results are consistent with the evidence from the Green Revolution.
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Paper provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in its series Working Papers with number
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References listed on IDEAS 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.:
Jovanovic, B. & Macdonald, G.M., 1988.
"Competitive Diffusion,"
RCER Working Papers
160, University of Rochester - Center for Economic Research (RCER).
Other versions:
Jovanovic, Boyan & MacDonald, Glenn M., 1988.
"Competitive Diffusion,"
Working Papers
88-29, C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics, New York University.
[Downloadable!]
Boyan Jovanovic & Glenn MacDonald, 1994.
"Competitive Diffusion,"
NBER Working Papers
4463, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Jovanovic, B. & MacDonald, G.M., 1991.
"Competitive Diffusion,"
Papers
92-08, Rochester, Business - Financial Research and Policy Studies.
Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silane & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1996.
"Law and Finance,"
NBER Working Papers
5661, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Rafael La Porta & Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1998.
"Law and Finance,"
Journal of Political Economy,
University of Chicago Press, vol. 106(6), pages 1113-1155, December.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Shorrocks, Anthony F, 1983.
"Ranking Income Distributions,"
Economica,
London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 50(197), pages 3-17, February.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
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