Three essays in technology, international trade and labor

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold: first, to investigate a new measurement of innovation and use this measure to examine the inter- and intra-industry and cross-border effects of innovation on domestic productivity; second, to examine how a worker may mitigate the duration of unexpected unemployment.; Chapter one constructs and examines a new data set consisting of patents processed by the OECD Technology Concordance. The result is a data set that improves upon previous work by incorporating the random aspect of innovation and identifying industry source and destination. This allows for a much more specific method to track where innovations originate and where they are used, both by industry and country, making possible international comparisons heretofore unavailable.; The second chapter utilizes this newly created data set to examine how innovation from foreign and domestic sources factors into US productivity. The results indicate that domestic inter-industry innovation flows have a positive effect on productivity. However, contrary to much of the current literature, foreign inter-industry innovation flows have a negative effect on domestic productivity. These results are contingent upon domestic market structure as measured by industry concentration ratio and import ratio. Further, when measuring separately innovation originating in the Information Technology and Chemicals and Drugs sectors and flowing to the rest of the economy, the overall effect on domestic productivity is statistically significant and sensitive to country of origin.; The third chapter, using the German Socio-Economic Panel, examines how on-the-job training (OJT) for a currently employed worker affects time to re-employment after an unexpected job displacement. Two statistical methods are used in the analysis. The first method is a survival analysis that controls for a range of individual worker characteristics. The second is a propensity score matching method to mitigate the selection bias problem. Empirical results indicate that those workers receiving OJT while employed were re-employed much sooner after an unexpected job displacement than workers who did not. This outcome indicates that periodic on-the-job training provides an ex-ante method for individuals to mitigate the effects of unexpected job displacement. Further, the results were similar across both statistical methods employed.