Past event
Department of Economics Seminar with Professor Kjell Salvanes, Norwegian School of Economics Gender-biased technological change: Milking machines and the exodus of women from farming
Kjell is a Professor of Economics and the Chair at NHH, a research fellow at the CEPR, CESifo and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. His research area is labour economics, in which he has a particular focus on the drivers of economic inequality and the persistence of inequality. He focuses on how to identify causal drivers of inequality related to public and parental investments in children, complementarities in economic shocks across childhood, and how these factors are played out in inequality as adults in education, health, and income. He has published many important papers in journals such as the AER, QJE, REStud, JPE, Journal of Labor Economics and many others.
Abstract: This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in 20th-century Norway. After WWII, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace the hand milking of cows, a task typically performed by young women. We show that the adoption of milking machines pushed young rural women out of farming in dairy-intensive municipalities. The displaced women moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paid employment. Our results suggest that the adoption of milking machines broke up allocative inefficiencies across sectors, which improved the economic status of women relative to men.