A high proportion of skilled workers in the labor force implies a large market size for skill-complementary technologies, and encourages faster upgrading of the productivity of skilled workers. As a result, an increase in the supply of skills reduces the skill premium in the short run, but then it induces skill-biased technical change and increases the skill premium, possibly even above its initial value. This theory suggests that the rapid increase in the proportion of college graduates in the United States labor force in the 1970s may have been a causal factor in both the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and the large increase in inequality during the 1980s.

Journal Article A New Assessment of Openness and Inflation: Reply Get access David Romer David Romer University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 113, Issue 2, May 1998, Pages 649–652, https://doi.org/10.1162/003355398555612 Published: 01 May 1998

We address long-standing problems in measuring medical inflation by estimating two types of price indices. The first, a Service Price Index, prices specific medical services, as does the current CPI. The second, a Cost of Living Index, measures a quality-adjusted cost of treating a health problem. We apply these indices to heart attack treatment between 1983 and 1994. More frequent reweighting and accounting for price discounts lowers the measured price change for heart attacks by three percentage points annually. Accounting for quality change lowers it further; we estimate that the real Cost of Living Index fell about 1 percent annually.

This paper examines the effect of skill-biased technological change as measured by computerization on the recent widening of U. S. educational wage differentials. An analysis of aggregate changes in the relative supplies and wages of workers by education from 1940 to 1996 indicates strong and persistent growth in relative demand favoring college graduates. Rapid skill upgrading within detailed industries accounts for most of the growth in the relative demand for college workers, particularly since 1970. Analyses of four data sets indicate that the rate of skill upgrading has been greater in more computer-intensive industries.

Lojack is a hidden radio-transmitter device used for retrieving stolen vehicles. Because there is no external indication that Lojack has been installed, it does not directly affect the likelihood that a protected car will be stolen. There may, however, be positive externalities due to general deterrence. We find that the availability of Lojack is associated with a sharp fall in auto theft. Rates of other crime do not change appreciably. At least historically, the marginal social benefit of an additional unit of Lojack has been fifteen times greater than the marginal social cost in high crime areas. Those who install Lojack, however, obtain less than 10 percent of the total social benefits, leading to underprovision by the market.

This paper offers a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for the general training they receive. The superior information of the current employer regarding its employees' abilities relative to other firms creates ex post monopsony power, and encourages this employer to provide and pay for training, even if these skills are general. The model can lead to multiple equlibria. In one equilibrium quits are endogenously high, and as a result employers have limited monopsony power and provide little training, while in another equilibrium quits are low and training is high. Using microdata on German apprentices, we show that the predictions of our model receive some support from the data.

This paper studies the Grossman-Hart-Moore (GHM) “property rights” approach to the theory of the firm under alternating-offers bargaining. When managers can pursue other occupations while negotiating over the division of the gains from cooperation, the GHM results obtain. If taking the best alternative job terminates bargaining, outcomes are very different. Sometimes an agent with an important investment decision should not own the assets he works with; sometimes independent assets should be owned together; sometimes strictly complementary assets should be owned separately.

We use data on health plan choices by employees of Harvard University to compare the benefits of insurance competition with the costs of adverse selection. Moving to a voucher-type system induced significant adverse selection, with a welfare loss of 2 to 4 percent of baseline spending. But increased competition reduced Harvard’s premiums by 5 to 8 percent. The premium reductions came from insurer profits, so while Harvard was better off, the net effect for society was only the adverse selection loss. Adverse selection can be minimized by adjusting voucher amounts for individual risk. We discuss how such a system would work. Governments are increasingly turning to market forces as a way to limit the cost of social insurance. Traditionally, social insurance programs were operated as nonmarket goods; govern-ments mandated participation in a central program, collected revenues to finance the program, and ran the insurance system. There was no role for competition among suppliers in providing the basic benefit.

We model growth and technology transfer in a world where technologies are specific to particular combinations of inputs. Unlike the usual specification, our model does not imply that an improvement in one technique for producing a given good improves all other techniques for producing that good. Technology improvements diffuse slowly across countries, although knowledge spreads instantaneously and there are no technology adoption costs. However, even with “Ak” production, our model implies conditional convergence. This model, with appropriate technology and technology diffusion, has more realistic predictions for convergence and growth than either the standard neoclassical model or simple endogenous-growth models.