期刊名称：Departmental Discussion Papers / University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
出版年度：2008
卷号：1
出版社：University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
摘要：In this paper we argue that government procurement policy played a role in stimulating
the wave of innovation that hit the US economy in the 1980.s, as well as the simultaneous
increase in inequality and in education attainment. Since the early 1980.s U.S. policy
makers began targeting commercial innovations more directly and explicitly. We focus
on the shift in the composition of public demand towards high-tech goods which, by
increasing the market-size of innovative .rms, functions as a de-facto innovation policy
tool. We build a quality-ladders non-scale growth model with heterogeneous industries
and endogenous supply of skills, and show both theoretically and empirically that increases
in the technological content of public spending stimulates R&D, raises the wage of skilled
workers and, at the same time, stimulates human capital accumulation. A calibrated
version of the model suggests that government policy explains up to 32 percent of the
observed increase in wage inequality in the period 1978-91.
