Essays on Technology Adoption, Demographics, and Development
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation is to connect empirical findings with grounded theoretical analysis on two economic issues. One of the studies investigates industrial productivity by fitting in a theoretical model with quantitative methods. In addition, I explore how a demographic policy in China brings forth a profound impact in all aspects of the fast-growing economy.The first chapter, ``Casual Labor, Uncertainty, and Technology Adoption in Agriculture," examines why both the technology adoption rate and labor productivity in agriculture are low in the context of developing countries. A two-stage model is built to explain how the availability of casual (non-permanent) labor ex-post, in the presence of uncertainty may affect agents' ex-ante technology choices. A higher degree of uncertainty induces the agents to choose traditional production technology that relies heavily on the labor input instead of using any modern intermediate inputs. By calibrating the model to fit the micro data in Tanzania, I show that this proposed framework can be used to account for two targets of interest: low aggregate labor productivity and the low technology adoption rate. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the severity of uncertainty before the harvest stage and the abundance of casual labor are the potential drivers for the two targets to be explained.The second chapter, ``Growth in a Patrilocal Economy: Female Schooling, Household Savings, and China's One-Child Policy," is co-authored Wei-Cheng Chen. We develop a model of parental education decision to analyze how a population control policy affects saving and schooling in a patrilocal society, where sons are responsible to support aged parents more than daughters. Parent's investment in education depends on the degree of parental altruism and the need for old-age security. A tightened population control policy makes parental altruism more important relative to the security motive and shortens gender gap in education. We also take another cru…
abstract: This dissertation is to connect empirical findings with grounded theoretical analysis on two economic issues. One of the studies investigates industrial productivity by fitting in a theoretical model with quantitative methods. In addition, I explore how a demographic policy in China brings forth a profound impact in all aspects of the fast-growing economy.The first chapter, ``Casual Labor, Uncertainty, and Technology Adoption in Agriculture," examines why both the technology adoption rate and labor productivity in agriculture are low in the context of developing countries. A two-stage model is built to explain how the availability of casual (non-permanent) labor ex-post, in the presence of uncertainty may affect agents' ex-ante technology choices. A higher degree of uncertainty induces the agents to choose traditional production technology that relies heavily on the labor input instead of using any modern intermediate inputs. By calibrating the model to fit the micro data in Tanzania, I show that this proposed framework can be used to account for two targets of interest: low aggregate labor productivity and the low technology adoption rate. Counterfactual exercises suggest that the severity of uncertainty before the harvest stage and the abundance of casual labor are the potential drivers for the two targets to be explained.The second chapter, ``Growth in a Patrilocal Economy: Female Schooling, Household Savings, and China's One-Child Policy," is co-authored Wei-Cheng Chen. We develop a model of parental education decision to analyze how a population control policy affects saving and schooling in a patrilocal society, where sons are responsible to support aged parents more than daughters. Parent's investment in education depends on the degree of parental altruism and the need for old-age security. A tightened population control policy makes parental altruism more important relative to the security motive and shortens gender gap in education. We also take another cru…
author: Lai, Ting-Wei
language: English (en)
keywords: Human capital, Intergenerational transfers, Labor productivity, Parental altruism, Technology adoption, Uncertainty, Economics
date published: 2015-05-15T07:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T06:12:08Z
provider: Washington University in St. Louis
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Washington University in St. Louis

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7936/K7CV4FWT