April 2002

IZA DP No. 478: Uneven Technical Progress and Unemployment

Hans Gersbach, Achim Schniewind

In a two-sector model with real wage rigidity, we examine how technical progress in one sector affects unemployment in the whole economy. We show that aggregate unemployment decreases for uneven technical change in the case of Cobb-Douglas production functions. For every type of technical progress, however, there are also elasticities of substitution in production and utility functions leading to a rise in unemployment. Moreover, we identify polar cases when unemployment strongly decreases.