Documents Acemoglu, Daron 19 results

"This is a provocative new theory of political economy explaining why the world is divided into nations with wildly differing levels of prosperity. Why are some nations more prosperous than others? "Why Nations Fail" sets out to answer this question, with a compelling and elegantly argued new theory: that it is not down to climate, geography or culture, but because of institutions. Drawing on an extraordinary range of contemporary and historical examples, from ancient Rome through the Tudors to modern-day China, leading academics Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson show that to invest and prosper, people need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep it - and this means sound institutions that allow virtuous circles of innovation, expansion and peace. Based on fifteen years of research, and answering the competing arguments of authors ranging from Max Weber to Jeffrey Sachs and Jared Diamond, Acemoglu and Robinson step boldly into the territory of Francis Fukuyama and Ian Morris. They blend economics, politics, history and current affairs to provide a new, powerful and persuasive way of understanding wealth and poverty. They offer a pragmatic basis for the hope that at 'critical junctures' in history, those mired in poverty can be placed on the path to prosperity - with important consequences for our views on everything from the role of aid to the future of China."

"This paper evaluates claims about the large macroeconomic implications of new advances in Artificial intelligence (AI). It starts from a task-based model of AI's effects, working through automation and task complementarities. So long as AI's microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the task level, its macroeconomic consequences will be given by a version of Hulten's theorem: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and aggregate productivity gains can be estimated by what fraction of tasks are impacted and average task-level cost savings. Using existing estimates on exposure to AI and productivity improvements at the task level, these macroeconomic effects appear non-trivial but modest – no more than a 0.66% increase in total factor productivity (TFP) over 10 years. The paper then argues that even these estimates could be exaggerated, because early evidence is from easy-to-learn tasks, whereas some of the future effects will come from hard-to-learn tasks, where there are many context-dependent factors affecting decision-making and no objective outcome measures from which to learn successful performance. Consequently, predicted TFP gains over the next 10 years are even more modest and are predicted to be less than 0.53%. I also explore AI's wage and inequality effects. I show theoretically that even when AI improves the productivity of low-skill workers in certain tasks (without creating new tasks for them), this may increase rather than reduce inequality. Empirically, I find that AI advances are unlikely to increase inequality as much as previous automation technologies because their impact is more equally distributed across demographic groups, but there is also no evidence that AI will reduce labour income inequality. Instead, AI is predicted to widen the gap between capital and labour income. Finally, some of the new tasks created by AI may have negative social value (such as the design of algorithms for online manipulation), and I discuss how to incorporate the macroeconomic effects of new tasks that may have negative social value."

"As robots and other computer-assisted technologies take over tasks previously performed by labor, there is increasing concern about the future of jobs and wages. We analyze the effect of the increase in industrial robot usage between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets. Using a model in which robots compete against human labor in the production of different tasks, we show that robots may reduce employment and wages, and that the local labor market effects of robots can be estimated by regressing the change in employment and wages on the exposure to robots in each local labor market—defined from the national penetration of robots into each industry and the local distribution of employment across industries. Using this approach, we estimate large and robust negative effects of robots on employment and wages across commuting zones. We bolster this evidence by showing that the commuting zones most exposed to robots in the post-1990 era do not exhibit any differential trends before 1990. The impact of robots is distinct from the impact of imports from China and Mexico, the decline of routine jobs, offshoring, other types of IT capital, and the total capital stock (in fact, exposure to robots is only weakly correlated with these other variables). According to our estimates, one more robot per thousand workers reduces the employment to population ratio by about 0.18-0.34 percentage points and wages by 0.25-0.5 percent."

"A key question in the economics of climate change is the importance of global policy coordination in reducing carbon emissions. In this paper, we study this question using a two-country (North–South) extension of Acemoglu et al. (2012) which introduces directed technical change into a general equilibrium model of climate change. We find that, first, the optimal policy necessarily requires global policy coordination, with the implementation of research subsidies and carbon taxes in both North and South. Second, under certain circumstances, appropriately chosen environmental regulations in the North alone can prevent the worst environmental disasters. In particular, such disasters can be prevented by a combination of carbon taxes and clean research subsidies under the restrictive conditions that (a) the two inputs are substitutable in both countries; (b) there is no international trade between the North and the South; and (c) the South imitates technologies invented in the North. Third, international trade between the North and the South typically makes it more difficult to prevent environmental disasters through unilateral policies in the North, because environmental regulation in the North may induce full specialization by the South in dirty input production, as imitation of clean technologies by the South then ceases to be profitable. Hence, given current circumstances, global policy coordination is highly desirable."

"Because of their more limited inequality and more comprehensive social welfare systems, many perceive average welfare to be higher in Scandinavian societies than in the United States. Why then does the United States not adopt Scandinavian-style institutions? More generally, in an interdependent world, would we expect all countries to adopt the same institutions? To provide theoretical answers to this question, we develop a simple model of economic growth in a world in which all countries benefit and potentially contribute to advances in the world technology frontier. A greater gap of incomes between successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs (thus greater
inequality) increases entrepreneurial effort and hence a country's
contribution to the world technology frontier. We show that, under
plausible assumptions, the world equilibrium is asymmetric: some countries will opt for a type of "cutthroat capitalism" that generates greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology leaders, while others will free- ride on the cutthroat incentives of the leaders and choose a more “cuddly” form of capitalism. Paradoxically, those with cuddly reward structures, though poorer, may have higher welfare than cutthroat capitalists; but in the world equilibrium, it is not a best response for the cutthroat capitalists to switch to a more cuddly form of capitalism.
We also show that domestic constraints from social democratic parties or unions may be beneficial for a country because they prevent cutthroat capitalism domestically, instead inducing other countries to play this role."

"Mondialisation et dynamique des inégalitésRisquesPierre-Noël GiraudLa question de savoir si la mondialisation est un facteur qui aggrave les inégalités économiques, tant entre les pays qu'à l'intérieur de chacun d'entre eux, mobilise de plus en plus les chercheurs. Le résultat qui ressort de la plupart des analyses sur séries longues est que l'évolution des inégalités – après une réduction ou stabilisation durant plusieurs décennies – est repartie à la hausse dans les décennies quatre-vingt et quatre-vingt-dix. Le rôle de la mondialisation est ambigu. Elle peut être un facteur favorable au rattrapage pour les pays pauvres – à condition de disposer de certains atouts comme un Etat fort et légitime. L'évolution des inégalités est également contrastée au sein des pays industrialisés. Quant au rôle de l'Etat, l'auteur souligne que si la mondialisation engendre des tendances inégalitaires internes, il ne faut pas oublier que les gouvernements disposent toujours de moyens pour les atténuer.Le double lien entre inégalités et croissanceConférence AfD-EUDN du 13 novembre 2003 à ParisOrazio Attanasio et Chiara BinelliL'analyse du lien entre les inégalités économiques et la croissance est depuis longtemps un sujet très controversé. Ce débat tient à la diversité des arguments et au caractère peu concluant des résultats empiriques. Sur le plan théorique, la relation entre les inégalités et la croissance est double. Elle peut être positive par le biais de l'épargne individuelle et des incitations à investir. Mais elle est susceptible également s'être négative. Les inégalités peuvent en effet être la cause d'une instabilité politique et sociale, d'une charge fiscale décourageante pour l'investissement ou d'un taux d'accumulation plus faible de capital humain. Les études empiriques – elles se heurtent à des problèmes méthodologiques et de qualité des données - sont aussi variées que les arguments théoriques. Néanmoins, les analyses les plus récentes confortent plutôt l'hypothèse d'un impact négatif des inégalités de revenus sur la croissance.L'influence de la technologie sur l'évolution des inégalitésNBER reporterDaron AcemogluL'idée selon laquelle le progrès technologique est un facteur déterminant de l'évolution des inégalités économiques est aujourd'hui largement répandue. En effet, le progrès technique favorise l'emploi de personnes plus qualifiées et augmente la demande de formation. La distribution des salaires serait ainsi biaisée en faveur des personnes plus formées. Néanmoins, le mécanisme de substitution ne joue pas toujours en faveur de l'emploi qualifié, comme l'a montré le XIXe siècle avec le développement des usines et des chaînes de montage. La révolution technologique qui se propage depuis les années soixante-dix est cependant d'une autre nature : il s'agit en fait d'un changement technologique endogène.Quel est l'apport des indicateurs composites des inégalités et de développement ?Premières journées du développement du GRESBruno BoidinLa question de la mesure est un sujet central dans l'étude des inégalités. L'éventail des indicateurs est grand, mais il se réduit si on se cantonne à une comparaison internationale. Dans ce contexte, le plus connu est certainement l'indicateur du développement humain (IDH) du Programme des Nations Unies pour le développement (PNUD). Mais comme tous les autres indicateurs, il est contesté. Afin de clarifier le débat, l'auteur propose des critères d'évaluation. Ils portent sur le bien-être, la comparabilité dans l'espace et dans le temps ainsi que sur l'utilisation de l'indicateur comme outil d'aide aux décideurs publics. L'auteur conclut qu'à l'avenir, on pourrait songer à combiner des indicateurs synthétiques du bien-être à des mesures plus sectoriels.La difficile mesure de la pauvreté en FranceConseil de l'emploi, des revenus et de la cohésion socialeLa lutte contre la pauvreté est devenue une des priorités des politiques économiques et sociales. L'analyse des causes de la pauvreté et de son évolution nécessite le recours à des informations dont la qualité ne paraît pas encore satisfaisante, comme l'atteste par exemple la disponibilité encore trop tardive des données synthétiques en France. Les auteurs proposent la mise en place de deux indicateurs de pauvreté, l'un tenant compte de l'évolution des seuls revenus des ménages pauvres, l'autre - plus classique - situant les revenus dans le cadre de la progression générale des revenus des ménages."