Capital-Intensive Projects Induce More Effort Than Labor-Intensive Projects
نویسندگان
چکیده
Central governments often subsidize capital spending by local governments, instead of subsidizing operating expenses or labor-intensive projects. This paper offers one explanation, focusing on the incentive effects for local officials—a local official can more easily shift the cost of optimizing a project to his successor on a labor-intensive project than on a capital-intensive project.
منابع مشابه
The social cost of labor in rural development : job creation benefits re - examined
Job creation effects are examined as they would apply to social analysis of rural development programming by public or private sector agencies. A synthesis and critique are provided of approaches to valuing the social opportunity cost of labor. These approaches vary according to whether or not unemployment is present in the pre-project state and according to whether or not there is interregiona...
متن کاملInternational Trade, the Gender Wage Gap, Female Labor Force Participation and Growth
This paper analyzes the effect of international trade on the gender wage gap and the resulting impact on households’ trade-off between female labor force participation (FLFP) and fertility. We argue that whenever trade expands sectors intensive in female labor, the gender wage gap widens and FLFP falls. In a model where male labor and female labor are two distinct factors of production we disti...
متن کاملEffects of Trade on Female Labor Force Participation
This paper uncovers a counter-intuitive effect of international trade on female labor shares: whenever trade expands sectors intensive in female labor, female labor shares drop. When capital complements female labor more than male labor, the following mechanism operates: Expansions of sectors intensive in female labor come along with contractions of sectors intensive in male labor. Thus, male l...
متن کاملRoads, Trade and Urbanization in the Tropics: Theory and Evidence from the Brazilian Amazon
The Brazilian Amazon has undergone a great transformation of its economy since the end of the 1990s, when the price of its export-oriented commodities increased in more than 200% in a few years. However, counties in the region experienced the effects of this soaring price differently according to their access to a federal road system constructed in the early 1970s. I take advantage of this inst...
متن کاملThe Stolper-Samuelson Effects of a Decline in Aggregate Consumption
Consider an economy in which various types of labor are used to produce consumption, but not all types of labor are useful for upgrading the stock of organization capital—that is, for replacing old projects with more productive new projects. When news induces consumers to want to save more, low-quality projects are destroyed across all sectors of the economy, even though the economy is set to i...
متن کامل