期刊名称：Departmental Discussion Papers / University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
出版社：University of Glasgow, Department of Economics
摘要：In this paper we argue that government spending played a significant role in stimulating the
wave of innovation that hit the U.S. economy in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, as well as the
simultaneous increase in inequality and in education attainment. Since the late 1970¡¯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 firms, 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 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 between 12 and 15 percent of the observed increase
in wage inequality in the period 1976-91.
