Accounting for Structural Change: Evidence from Two Centuries of U.S. Data

Benjamin N. Dennis () and Talan B. Işcan ()
Additional contact information
Talan B. Işcan: Department of Economics, Dalhousie University

Working Papers from Dalhousie University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Historically, the reallocation of labor out of agriculture has been a dominant feature of structural change and economic growth. This paper proposes a framework to decompose this reallocation into components based on three of its key potential drivers: (i) non- homothetic preferences, (ii) sectoral differences in productivity growth rates, and (iii) sectoral differences in factor intensities in production. We then quantify the relative contribution of each of these drivers to U.S. structural change in the last two centuries. Our empirical results show that non-homothetic preferences and differential sectoral productivity growth have been very significant determinants of the labor reallocation process in the U.S. and that, over the last two centuries, their relative contributions have changed in important ways.

Keywords: Long-run structural change; non-homothetic preferences; relative productivity growth; relative capital deepening (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2007-03-27
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Explorations in Economic History, 2009, pages 186-202

Downloads: (external link)
http://wp.economics.dal.ca/RePEc/dal/wpaper/DalEconWP2007-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dal:wpaper:daleconwp2007-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dalhousie University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by James McNeil ().