Health, Work Intensity, and Technological Innovations

Raouf Boucekkine (1, 2) , Natali Hritonenko (3) , Yuri Yatsenko (4)

1 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille
2 IRES-CORE
3 Prairie View
4 School of business, Houston Baptist University

Work significantly affects human life and health. Overworking may decrease the quality of life and cause direct economic losses. Technological innovations encourage modernization of firms' capital and improve labor productivity in the workplace. The paper investigates the optimal individual choice of work intensity under improving technology embodied in new equipment leading to shorter lifetime of capital goods (obsolescence). The balanced growth trajectories are analyzed in this context to find out, in particular, how the optimal choice of work intensity is tied to the rate of embodied technological change. The impact of embodied technological advances on the work/life balance problem is discussed and their macroeconomic consequences are highlighted.

Mots clés: vintage capital; technological development; work-life balance; rational individual choice

Domaines: Economies et finances

Raouf Boucekkine, Natali Hritonenko, Yuri Yatsenko. Health, Work Intensity, and Technological Innovations. 2013. ⟨halshs-00805199⟩