Schooling, Skill Demand, and Differential Fertility in the Process of Structural Transformation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Cheung, T. Terry
• 署名单位: Academia Sinica - Taiwan
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MACROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7707
• DOI: 10.1257/mac.20180348
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 305-330
• 关键词: UNITED-STATES; productivity growth; child labor; population; agriculture; mobility

摘要

Demography and structural transformation are interrelated, and depend critically on education. At the turn of the twentieth century, US parents began having fewer children while increasing educa-tional investment per child. This quantity-quality tradeoff facilitated job reallocation from the low-skilled agricultural sector to the high-skilled nonagricultural sector. This transformation is examined in a heterogeneous agent model with a nondegenerate human capital distribution, focusing on how fertility and education decisions affect structural transformation. The result shows that the quantity-quality decisions account for up to approximately one-third of the decline in the agricultural employment share. (JEL E24, I21, I26, J11, J13, J24, N31)