| This dissertation is a set of three essays investigates the impact of labor productivity growth on the labor market. In my first essay, I find that rapid labor productivity growth in India has led to a situation in which output growth is itself "jobless." Using a Kaldorian framework of endogenous productivity growth, I find that Kaldor-Verdoorn effects in the economy have become more predominant over time, especially in the postreform (1994-2008) period.;My estimated Kaldor-Verdoorn coefficients for both formal sector and total employment have dropped dramatically over time suggesting that India has leapfrogged into a high-productivity regime. I examine some explanations for why these Kaldor-Verdoorn effects have become pronounced over time and find that wage pressure cannot account for the rising labor productivity and capital-intensity of output while a shift in the composition of demand towards higher productivity sectors is an important part of the explanation.;My second essay describes and explains the segmentation of women in SEZ employment. It provides recent estimates of the female share of employment in SEZs and reviews the quality of SEZ employment in terms of wages, working conditions and flexibility of employment. I argue that SEZs are female intensive because they focus on low value-added and labor-intensive activities, as a result of their location within global value chains (GVCs), and not only because they export.;In my third essay, I find that industrial upgrading, proxied by the rising labor productivity and capital intensity of production, negatively impacts the female share of employment in South-east Asia and Latin America due to gender norms that segment women into low value-added activities. Building on Caraway's (2007) "gendered political economy" framework that emphasizes the role of gender bias in creating "gendered sectors" in which women are segmented into relatively labor-intensive production while men predominate in capital-intensive activities, I present a simple model of feminization and defeminization. I test for this segmentation using a fixed effects empirical model and find that the female share of employment decreases as both manufacturing productivity and capital intensity increase. |
