Night and Day: Diurnal Warming and Structural Transformation in India

This paper finds diverging partial effects of diurnal warming (higher nighttime and daytime temperatures) on agricultural wage-labour shares from decadal Indian Censuses (1981-2011).

Though both margins contract grain output and cultivated area, only higher maxima raise harvest prices locally, consistent with a model where warmer nights shock land but warmer days shock land and labour productivity.

Warming nights shift seasonal workers and self-cultivators into agricultural labour; warming days push labour to the seasonal margin.

Long differences show the labour divergence is rural.

In towns, both margins depress non-agricultural worker shares.