IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tor/tecipa/tecipa-351.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Media is the Measure: Technical change and employment, 1909-49

Author

Listed:
  • Michelle Alexopoulos
  • Jon Cohen

Abstract

Difficulties in sorting out the empirical relationship between technical change and employment is attributable, at least in part, to the shortcomings associated with traditional measures of the former. In this paper, we use new indicators of technical change that we believe resolve many issues associated with other methods of identifying technology shocks, and use them to explore the impact of technical change on employment from 1909-49. The payoff to this effort is substantial for at least three reasons. First, it sheds light on the role of technology shocks in cyclical fluctuations during this period, second, it informs business cycle model selection (New Keynesian vs. Real Business Cycle), and, third, it contributes to our understanding of the part played by the New Deal Policies in the recovery from the Great Depression.

Suggested Citation

  • Michelle Alexopoulos & Jon Cohen, 2009. "The Media is the Measure: Technical change and employment, 1909-49," Working Papers tecipa-351, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-351
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-351.pdf
    File Function: Main Text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Why Economies Boom
      by Megan McArdle in Megan McArdle on 2012-05-06 23:22:48

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Business Cycles; Technical Change; Great Depression; Unemployment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E2 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment
    • E3 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles
    • N1 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations
    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tor:tecipa:tecipa-351. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: RePEc Maintainer (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.