Education, Labor Quality and U.S. Agricultural Growth

Sun Ling Wang, Agapi Somwaru and Eldon Ball

No 205351, 2015 AAEA & WAEA Joint Annual Meeting, July 26-28, San Francisco, California from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: This study employs a Tὄrnqvist index approach to construct quality-adjusted labor index for the U.S. farm sector using the volume (hours worked) of 192 demographic components and their corresponding cost shares. We decompose labor input change into quality change and quantity change. The results show that between 1948 and 2011 the decline of total hours worked resulted in -0.58 percentage points of output growth per year while increasing labor quality contributed to 0.08 percentage points of annual output growth. We further decompose labor quality change into a change in the educational attainment of the labor force and a change due to other factors. Our results show that the education component contributed to most of the labor quality changes during the study period. However, the contribution of educational attainment is greater in earlier years than in later years.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Labor and Human Capital; Productivity Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-eff
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea15:205351

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.205351

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