Schooling, Skill Demand and Differential Fertility in the Process of Structural Transformation
2018/01/16
研討會日期 : 2018-01-16
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Mr. T. Terry Cheung (張庭源)
主持人 : Professor Chu-An Liu
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Mr. Cheung will receive his Ph.D. in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. His research fields are Macroeconomics, Growth and Development, Economic Demography and Economic History. He is applying for a position of the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica now.
演講摘要 : The aggregate fertility rate and the agricultural employment share in the U.S. both declined from the late 19th century to the eve of the baby boom. I document two important forces behind this observation: (1) the agricultural sector had a higher fertility rate, so when the share of the agricultural sector declined, the aggregate fertility rate followed; (2) the education reform increased the relative odds that rural youth received an education and moved to the non-farm sector. I build a two-sector overlapping generations model that features endogenous fertility and occupational choice to evaluate the effects of the education reform, the technological progress and child-rearing cost. Through counterfactual analysis, I find that the education reform accounts for one fourth of the declines in the fertility rate, and that of the agricultural employment share drop, together with more than half of the skill intensity increase in the model. Shutdown quality-quantity tradeoff channel by exogenously fixing the fertility rates would reduce 20% of the structural trans-formation generated in the model.
