Offered wage and recipient attribute: Wage functions for rural labour in India

Abstract

Wage functions are estimated for daily-hire labour in two village markets in India through a single-equation procedure, with the dependent variable defined to yield a true measure of offered wage in the presence of censorship. Wages for males rise with age up to forty, but decline thereafter. For females, by contrast, reward for experience is relatively unimportant, but there is a positive association between offered wage and economic status. These findings differ from those reported so far in the literature without correction for censorship bias, and challenge the assumed homogeneity of rural labour in much theorising about factor markets in less developed countries.