Life Earnings and Rural-Urban Migration



Robert E. Lucas, Jr.
University of Chicago


This paper is a theoretical study of rural-urban migration—urbanization—
as it has occurred in many low-income economies in the postwar
period. This process is viewed as a transfer of labor from a traditional,
land-intensive technology to a human capital–intensive
technology with an unending potential for growth. The model emphasizes
the role of cities as places in which new immigrants can
accumulate the skills required by modern production technologies.