🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates how asymmetric diurnal warming affects rural labor structure and non-agricultural employment transitions in India. Leveraging decadal census panel data from 1981 to 2011 and integrating theoretical modeling with econometric analysis, it reveals for the first time heterogeneous effects of nighttime versus daytime temperature increases on agricultural employment: nighttime warming drives owner-cultivators into agricultural wage labor, whereas daytime warming pushes workers toward seasonal non-farm jobs. In urban areas, both forms of warming suppress the share of non-agricultural employment. The paper innovatively incorporates diurnal temperature variation into the climate–economy analytical framework, elucidating how differential impacts on land and labor productivity underpin structural transformation across rural and urban sectors.
📝 Abstract
This paper finds diverging partial effects of diurnal warming (higher nighttime and daytime temperatures) on agricultural wage-labour shares from decadal Indian Censuses (1981-2011). Though both margins contract grain output and cultivated area, only higher maxima raise harvest prices locally, consistent with a model where warmer nights shock land but warmer days shock land and labour productivity. Warming nights shift seasonal workers and self-cultivators into agricultural labour; warming days push labour to the seasonal margin. Long differences show the labour divergence is rural. In towns, both margins depress non-agricultural worker shares.