Daron Acemoglu

Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution

A method and apparatus for the removal of cakes from an open filter press is proposed which involves directing one or more jets of a pressure fluid towards the chamber to impinge on an edge of the cake and/or on the filter cloth adjacent such edge. If desired, the jet or jets are oscillatable so as to sweep across the said edge or the filter cloth adjacent such edge.

Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market

This essay discusses the effect of technical change on wage inequality. I argue that the behavior of wages and returns to schooling indicates that technical change has been skill-biased during the past sixty years. Furthermore, the recent increase in inequality is most likely due to an acceleration in skill bias. In contrast to twentieth century developments, most technical change during the nineteenth century appears to be skill-replacing. I suggest that this is because the increased supply of unskilled workers in the English cities made the introduction of these technologies profitable. On the other hand, the twentieth-century has been characterized by skill-biased technical change because the rapid increase in the supply of skilled workers has induced the development of skill-complementary technologies. The recent acceleration in skill bias is in turn likely to have been a response to the acceleration in the supply of skills during the past several decades.

Why Do New Technologies Complement Skills? Directed Technical Change and Wage Inequality

This paper considers an economy where skilled and unskilled workers use different technologies. The rate of improvement of each technology is determined by a profit-maximizing R&D sector. When there is a high proportion of skilled workers in the labour-force, the market for skill-complementary technologies is larger and more effort will be spent in upgrading the productivity of skilled workers. An implication of this theory is that when the relative supply of skilled workers increases exogenously, the skill premium decreases in the short run, but then increases, possibly even above its initial value, because the larger market for skill-complementary technologies has changed the direction of technical change. This suggests that the rapid increase in the proportion of college graduates in the US labour-force may have been causal in both the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and the large increase in inequality during the 1980s. The paper also derives implications of directed technical change for residual wage inequality and shows that calculations of the impact of international trade on inequality that ignore the change in the direction of technical progress may be misleading.

Why Did the West Extend the Franchise? Democracy, Inequality, and Growth in Historical Perspective

During the nineteeth century, most Western societies extended the franchise, a decision which led to unprecedented redistributive programs. We argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decisions by political elites to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution.

Income and Democracy

We revisit one of the central empirical findings of the political economy literature that higher income per capita causes democracy. Existing studies establish a strong cross-country correlation between income and democracy, but do not typically control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables. We show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and various measures of democracy. We also present instrumental-variables estimates using two different strategies. These estimates also show no causal effect of income on democracy. Furthermore, we reconcile the positive cross-country correlation between income and democracy with the absence of a causal effect of income on democracy by showing that the long-run evolution of income and democracy is related to historical factors. Consistent with this, the positive correlation between income and democracy disappears, even without fixed effects, when we control for the historical determinants of economic and political development in a sample of former European colonies.

A Theory of Political Transitions

We develop a theory of political transitions inspired in part by the experiences of Western Europe and Latin America. Nondemocratic societies are controlled by a rich elite. The initially disenfranchised poor can contest power by threatening social unrest or revolution, and this may force the elite to democratize. Democracy may not consolidate because it is more redistributive than a nondemocratic regime, and this gives the elite an incentive to mount a coup. Because inequality makes democracy more costly to the elite, highly unequal cocieties are less likely to consolidate democracy and may end up oscillating between regimes or in a nondemocratic repressive regime. An unequal society is likely to experience fiscal volatility, but the relationship between inequality and redistribution is nonmonotonic; societies with intermediate levels of unequality consolidate democracy and redistribute more than both very equal and very unequal countries. We also show that asset redistribution, such as educational and land reform, may be used to consolidate both democratic and nondemocratic regimes

The Structure of Wages and Investment in General Training

In the human capital model with perfect labor markets, firms never invest in general skills and all cost of general training are borne by workers. When lobor market frictions compress the structure of wages, firms may pay for these investments. The distortion in the wage structure turns “technologically” general skills into de facto “specific ” skills. Credit market imperfections are neither neccessary nor sufficient for firm‐sponsored training. Since labor market frictions and insititutions shape the wage structure, they may have an important impact on the financing and amount of human capital investments and account for some international differences in training practices.

Persistence of Power, Elites, and Institutions

We construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de facto political power. A change in political institutions, for example a move from nondemocracy to democracy, alters the distribution of de jure political power, but the elite can intensify their investments in de facto political power, such as lobbying or the use of paramilitary forces, to partially or fully offset their loss of de jure power. In the baseline model, equilibrium changes in political institutions have no effect on the (stochastic) equilibrium distribution of economic institutions, leading to a particular form of persistence in equilibrium institutions, which we refer to as invariance. When the model is enriched to allow for limits on the exercise of de facto power by the elite in democracy or for costs of changing economic institutions, the equilibrium takes the form of a Markov regime-switching process with state dependence. Finally, when we allow for the possibility that changing political institutions is more difficult than altering economic institutions, the model leads to a pattern of captured democracy, whereby a democratic regime may survive, but choose economic institutions favoring the elite. The main ideas featuring in the model are illustrated using historical examples from the U.S. South, Latin America and Liberia.

Efficient Unemployment Insurance

This paper constructs a tractable general equilibrium model of search with risk aversion. An increase in risk aversion reduces wages, unemployment, and investment. Unemployment insurance has the opposite effect: insured workers seek high‐wage jobs with high unemployment risk. An economy with risk‐neutral workers achieves maximal output without any unemployment insurance, but an economy with risk‐averse workers requires a positive level of unemployment insurance to maximize output. Therefore, moderate unemployment insurance not only improves risk sharing but also increases output.

A Microfoundation for Social Increasing Returns in Human Capital Accumulation

This paper proposes a microfoundation for social increasing returns in human capital accumulation. The underlying mechanism is a pecuniary externality due to the interaction of ex ante investments and costly bilateral search in the labor market. It is shown that the equilibrium rate of return on the human capital of a worker is increasing in the average human capital of the workforce even though all the production functions in the economy exhibit constant returns to scale, there are no technological externalities, and all workers are competing for the same jobs.