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The Cotton Harvester in Retrospect: Labor Displacement or Replacement?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Willis Peterson  and
Yoav Kislev
Willis Peterson
Affiliation:
Professor of Agricultural and Applied Economics at University of Minnesota, St. Paul, 55108
Yoav Kislev
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Agricultural Economics at Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel
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Abstract

The prevailing view of new mechanical technology is that it has, in large part, pushed labor out of agriculture. An alternative hypothesis is that labor has been pulled out of agriculture by higher wages in nonfarm occupations. The mechanical cotton harvester is used to test the two hypotheses. Estimation of a simultaneous-equation model of the labor market for cotton pickers reveals 79 percent of reduction in hand picking of cotton was due to increased nonfarm wages—the pull effect; the remaining 21 percent is attributed to the decreased cost of machine harvesting—the push effect.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , March 1986 , pp. 199 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1986

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References

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