The dissertation consists of three essays that deal with variations in economic
growth and development across space and time. The essays in particular explore the
importance of differences in occupational structures in various settings.
The first chapter documents that intergenerational occupational persistence is significantly
higher in poor countries even after controlling for cross-country differences
in occupational structures. Based on this empirical fact, I posit that high occupational
persistence in poor countries is symptomatic of underlying talent misallocation.
Constraints on education financing force sons to choose fathers’ occupations over the
occupations of their comparative advantage. A version of Roy (1951) model of occupational
choice is developed to quantify the impact of occupational misallocation on
aggregate productivity. I find that output per worker reduces to a third of the benchmark
US economy for the country with the highest level of occupational persistence.
In the second chapter, I use occupational prestige as a proxy of social status to estimate
intergenerational occupational mobility for 50 countries spanning the breadth
of world’s income distribution for both sons and daughters. I find that although relative
mobility varies significantly across countries, the correlation between relative
mobility and GDP per capita is only mildly positive for sons and is close to zero for
daughters. I also consider two measures of absolute mobility: the propensity to move
across quartiles and the propensity to move relative to father’s occupational prestige.
Similar to relative mobility, the first measure of absolute mobility is uncorrelated with
GDP per capita. The second measure, however, is positively correlated with GDP per
capita with correlations being significantly higher for sons compared to daughters.