Workforce Education and Technical Change Bias in U.S. Agriculture and Related Industries

摘要

The number of hours devoted to value added output in the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) sector “Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting” is increasingly supplied by individuals with advanced schooling. Consistent with hypotheses of a positive relationship among technology development, adoption, and dissemination and a more highly-skilled workforce, we first test and then conclude that the composition of the workforce is closely aligned with measures of the state of technology. Consistent with many other studies, technical change has been labor-saving overall, yet technologies adopted have reduced both the absolute and relative numbers of workers not progressing beyond high school. The changing composition of the workforce and technical change have driven an average wedge of 31% between reported wages and wages augmented by our estimates of the state of technology. This gap was greater in the period prior to the mid 1980s, when many of the changes in the education levels of the labor force occurred. Using estimates from the entire 1947–2010 period, the quantity of work provided by the worker hired in 2010 was 31% greater than if no change in labor composition had occurred.