TY - JOUR
T1 - Wages, human capital, and barriers to structural transformation
AU - Herrendorf, Berthold
AU - Schoellman, Todd
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Economic Association.
PY - 2018/4/1
Y1 - 2018/4/1
N2 - We document for 13 countries ranging from rich (Canada, United States) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. Moreover, agriculture has less educated workers and lower Mincer returns. We view these findings through the lens of a multi-sector model in which workers differ in observed and unobserved characteristics and sectors differ in their human-capital intensities. We derive expressions for the implied barriers to the reallocation of labor out of agriculture. We find that in our sample these barriers are considerably smaller than what the macro-development literature has argued.
AB - We document for 13 countries ranging from rich (Canada, United States) to poor (India, Indonesia) that average wages are considerably lower in agriculture than in the other sectors. Moreover, agriculture has less educated workers and lower Mincer returns. We view these findings through the lens of a multi-sector model in which workers differ in observed and unobserved characteristics and sectors differ in their human-capital intensities. We derive expressions for the implied barriers to the reallocation of labor out of agriculture. We find that in our sample these barriers are considerably smaller than what the macro-development literature has argued.
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U2 - 10.1257/mac.20160236
DO - 10.1257/mac.20160236
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85044769222
VL - 10
SP - 1
EP - 23
JO - American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
JF - American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
SN - 1945-7707
IS - 2
ER -