UC Davis Agricultural and Resource Economics

Diane Charlton: Agricultural Economics & Economics at Montana State University

March 2, 2016

Diane Charlton has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Agricultural Economics & Economics Department at Montana State University. Her dissertation analyzes the causes and consequences of the agricultural transformation in rural Mexico, the stage of development when a country's workforce transitions from working primarily in agriculture to working primarily in the non-agricultural sector. She finds that the probability that an individual from rural Mexico worked primarily in agriculture in either the U.S. or Mexico decreased by 0.97 percentage points on average each year from 1980 to 2010. Growing non-farm employment in Mexico, and rising education and decreasing birthrates in rural Mexico are significant factors in the trend of labor out of agriculture. In the coming years, Mexican and U.S. farms will have to compete for a diminishing farm labor supply and invest in labor-saving practices and technologies that farms can produce more with fewer workers. This is expected to raise average farm worker productivity and consequently farm worker wages. Diane's dissertation committee members are J. Edward Taylor (chair), Katrina Jessoe, Giovanni Peri, and Aaron Smith.

 

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