 Capital Obsolescence and Agricultural ProductivityElisa Keller and Julieta Caunedo No 686, 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Abstract: Cross-country disparities in agricultural productivity are large and on average, larger than in other sectors of the economy. This paper studies the role of capital-embodied technology adoption in explaining these cross-country disparities. We construct a novel data set of second-hand prices of agricultural equipment (tractors) across countries. We then present a vintage capital model that links equipment prices to the quality and composition of the stock of capital. In particular, a) the path of the best available equipment quality in a country is linked to the evolution of the price of any piece of equipment through time; and b) the composition of the capital stock is linked to cross country dierences in the price level of a piece of equipment. Using the unique characteristics of our data set, we document that countries with higher agricultural labor productivity have steeper age-price proles for tractors with comparable characteristics. We find that quality disparities in the stock of capital explain 24% of the differences in agricultural productivity growth across countries. Moreover, one-third of the disparities in the level of productivity can be accounted for by disparities in capital embodied technology. Date: 2016 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:red:sed016:686 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2016 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.