The key issues on the negotiation table in the agriculture sector are the elimination of export subsidies, a progressive reduction of tariffs and reduction in domestic support. However, it is observed that trade liberalization often involves moving from one set of distortions to another rather...

The paper addresses the economics of recent boycott strategies and impacts of the agreements on labor and industry. A multi-level market model is used to address the linkage between Taco Bell, growers and labor. Analysis of the resulting segmentation of the labor market is also included.

Immigration issues regained national prominence after the events of September 2001. Much of the specialty crop sector workforce is foreign-born and unauthorized, implying that there may be significant challenges ahead if stringent immigration legislation is passed. This paper assesses the...

A stationary, first-order Markov chain model with selection bias correction for legal status is estimated by maxixmum likelihood methods using the National Agricultural Worker Survey data for 1989-2004 to evaluate the likelihood of workers staying in U.S. agriculture by legal status. Although...

I test to see if the returns to wages for Mexican workers have changed in the Pre- and Post-NAFTA periods using data from the Mexican Migration Project using a pseudo panel analysis framework. The results here suggest that the returns to wages for workers in Mexico have declined significantly in...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/11/06.

Replaced with revised version of paper 11/01/06.

This paper examines the effects of state and local immigration enforcement efforts on the U.S. Farming sector. We use variation in enforcement efforts generated by the timing of adoption of 287(g) programs by state and county law enforcement agencies (allowing local officers to be trained to...

We analyze the link between large and destructive floods and armed conflict in 117 countries between 1985 and 2009 employing flood-induced migration as a potential transmission channel. We use rainfall as an instrument for flood-induced migration and employ a two step procedure (Rivers and Vuong...