Essays on Macroeconomic Development

Agricultural productivity is important for understanding international income differences. The international labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture. Moreover, poor countries have higher agricultural employment shares. Therefore, my thesis studies why cross-country labor productivity differences are much larger in agriculture.;In the first chapter, I argue that the prevalence of untitled land in poor countries lowers their agricultural productivity. Since untitled land cannot be traded across farmers, it creates land misallocation and distorts individuals' occupational choice between farming and working outside agriculture. I build a model to quantify the impact of untitled land. I find that economies with higher percentages of untitled land would have lower agricultural productivity; land titling can increase agricultural productivity by up to 82.5%.;The second chapter studies agricultural productivity through technology adoption. Cross-country differences in capital intensity are larger in agriculture than in non-agriculture, reflecting differences in agricultural technology adoption. I build a model featuring technology adoption in agriculture. As the economy develops, farmers gradually replace the traditional technology with a modern technology which has higher capital intensity and higher productivity, as is observed in the U.S. historical data. For countries at different stages of development, my model can explain 1.56-fold more of agricultural productivity differences compared to a model without technology adoption. I further show that land misallocation in agriculture impedes technology adoption and magnify productivity differences.;The third chapter, co-authored with Diego Restuccia and Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis, uses detailed household-level micro data from Ethiopia to study factor misallocation and its impact on agricultural productivity. We find substantial factor misallocation across farmers in agriculture. An efficient reallocation of resources can increase aggregate agricultural output and productivity by 127 percent. Land rentals substantially improve resource allocation, with market-based rentals much more effective in reducing misallocation. Exploiting regional variation in land rentals resulting from the implementation of a land certification reform, we find that more land rentals are associated with lower misallocation and higher agricultural productivity: a one percentage point higher land rental is associated with a 0.8 percentage points higher agricultural productivity.