In the last decades there has been a lot of concern about structural changes in the labour market caused by innovations. A lot of studies have been published and may be divided in different strands of literature: skill-biased technological change and its evolution routine-biased technological change, evolutionary theory and geographical theories on tacit knowledge and spatial inequality.
In this study I am going to find and explain the effects of innovations on spatial inequality both in and out of the labour market. Regarding the effects in the labour market I can study the ones on value added, hours worked, productivity, employment and compensation of employees both within and between different sector and maybe wage inequality, regarding the effects out of the labour market I can study the ones on growth and maybe income inequality.
In this study I am going to answer questions like: Are the structural changes caused by innovations enough to explain the increase of inequality, or are there other channels linked to innovations? And if this is the case which are these channels? Have innovations the same effects in all sectors?
Increase in productivity in one sector (or industry or firm) may also change the demand of labour in other sectors, so I am going to try to find the substitutabilities and complementarities between sectors.
Although the field of my research is not new and there is a lot of literature about the effects of innovations on the labour market, most of the contributions consider the effects on employment and wages, rather than on inequality. In addition, for my knowledge, only Autor and Salomons (2017) analyse the effects of innovations at a macrosector level, but only on the dynamics of wages and employment and not on wage inequality and only Peters et al. (2014) analyse the heterogeneity of the effects of innovations during the business cycle, in the levels of aggregation (firm and sectoral) and in the different sectors. There are more studies regarding the geographical effects of innovations, but as for my knowledge there are no studies that examine both the effects on different sectors and the effects on different countries and/or groups of countries.
To sum up the research will not be as innovative as other researches might be, but it will represent a new step forward to understand and explain the effects of innovations on inequality. The sectoral and geographical levels of analysis allow also to more targeted policies about innovations that could be more effective in increasing wages and employment without increasing wage, income and spatial inequality. They may also explain at which level inequality is increasing the most, not only because of innovations but also because of other reasons, so the utility of this study will go beyond the economics of innovations towards the labour economics, the economic geography and the urban economics.