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Seminario CEDE - Steven Brownstone
11 Feb
11 Feb
Activo
Presencial

Seminario CEDE - Steven Brownstone

Facultad de Economía

12:30 pm 01:50 pm Universidad de los Andes

Facultad de Economía

Agricultural mechanization plays an important role in countries’ productivity growth. Through labor markets, mechanization’s impacts extend beyond mechanizing farmers themselves. This study presents results from a randomized experiment that studies the impact of reducing farmer barriers to mechanization at the village level. By combining government farmer training infrastructure with rentals, the intervention tripled the uptake of a technology that replaced manual rice transplanting. For farmers, labor costs decreased with no change in yields or other expenses, leading to a 6% increase in profits. At the labor market level, mechanization led to a 7% decrease in days of labor demanded for transplanting, which translated to a 6% decrease in piece-rate transplanting wages. Beyond the first-order distributional impacts, the wage effects reduce the relative profitability of further mechanization. This is illustrated in a quantitative model calibrated to the experimental results. The model shows how the same reduction in the fixed cost of adopting mechanization under a shallower labor supply curve results in larger increases in productivity with more income for workers. The study shows how labor market frictions shape how mechanization impacts workers, farmers, and economies.

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