An optimizing representative firm pays efficiency wages to skilled workers to produce technological innovations, which are assumed to be of labor saving type, affecting negatively the hiring rate of unskilled workers. The results are: i) The efficiency wage of skilled workers is determined by the Solow condition; ii) There is underemployment of unskilled workers whenever the added value of innovations is greater than the opportunity cost of skilled workers’ wages; iii) The optimal level of technology is independent of technological parameters; iv) The employment of skilled workers increases with the level of technology and decreases with the efficiency wage; v) The employment of unskilled workers is not necessarily negatively affected by technological innovations in the steady state.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
17185.
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.: