Intergenerational Bargaining in Technology Adoption

I study the choice of technology adoption in an environment where human capital is transmitted from the old to the young generation, but the young generation can opt out for a new technology. The adoption and matching decisions are made in a sequential intergenerational bargaining. Since technology adoption benefits future generations who do not participate in the bargaining, there is an inherent bias toward preserving the current technology. The main result is that economic integration (i.e., the sharing of frontier technology among countries) promotes growth while political integration (i.e., the merging of countries into a single bargaining) promotes stagnation.