GOVERNMENT SPENDING COMPOSITION, TECHNICAL CHANGE, AND WAGE INEQUALITY
研究美国1970年代末至1980年代政府支出构成转向高技术产品如何刺激创新、加剧工资不平等并促进教育积累，模型显示政府政策解释了1976-1991年间工资不平等增长的12%至15%。
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 attainments. Since the late 1970s U.S. policymakers began targeting commercial innovations more directly and explicitly. We focus on the shift in the composition of public demand toward 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 an increase 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% of the observed increase in wage inequality in the period 1976–1991. \n \n