Discussion Papers no. 795

Identifying the sector bias of technical change

The empirical literature studying the sector bias of technical change has only focused on skill-biased technical change.

The empirical literature studying the sector bias of technical change has only focused on skill-biased technical change. In this paper, I analyse the sector bias of both factor-neutral and factor-biased technical change. In Norwegian data from 1972 to 2007 the empirical evidence is not clear on the impact of a sector bias of skill-biased technical change, but it points to a sector bias of factor-neutral technical change from the 1970s to the 1990s. That said, the impact of the sector bias seems to have reduced towards the latter part of the sample period. I also evaluate the cross-section model used in the literature and show the strong restrictions that must be placed on a vector equilibrium correction model to end up with the standard model. If these restrictions do not hold, the results reported in the literature may be biased. I show that the restrictions are strongly rejected, and that erroneously imposing them significantly changes the estimates of skill-biased technical change in many sectors. These results can, to some extent, be traced back to how the cross-section model ignores initial disequilibrium and imposes factors of production to be either complements or substitutes.

About the publication

Title

Identifying the sector bias of technical change

Author

Thomas von Brasch

Series and number

Discussion Papers no. 795

Publisher

Statistics Norway

Topic

Discussion Papers

ISSN

1892-753X

Number of pages

33

Language

English

About Discussion Papers

Discussion papers comprise research papers intended for international journals and books. A preprint of a Discussion Paper may be longer and more elaborate than a standard journal article as it may include intermediate calculations, background material etc.

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