This paper studies whether a minimum wage changes how labour markets respond to economic shocks. Using data from South Africa, we show that an agricultural minimum wage leads to higher mean wages with no significant impacts on mean employment. However, these positive aggregate outcomes hide...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household's preference for...

A consistent finding in the development literature is that average non-farm labor productivity is higher than average farm labor productivity. These differences in average productivity are sometimes used to promote policies which advance the non-farm sector. In this paper, we analyze the...

Better understanding the geography of women's labor market outcomes within countries is important to inform targeted efforts to increase women's economic empowerment. This paper assesses the extent to which a method that combines simulated survey data from urban areas in Mexico with broadly...

According to standard economic theory, households should equate the marginal revenue product of an input across activities within the household. However, this prediction may not hold in the presence of risk. Using data on farm plots and non-farm enterprises in Malawi, we examine the impact of...

I document negative externalities of air pollution in the Indian agricultural sector. Using variation in pollution induced by changes in wind across years, I show that higher levels of pollution lead to decreased agricultural productivity, with large changes in productivity being common. The...

Using detailed monthly panel data from rural India, this paper analyzes sectoral wage gaps for men and women. I document three important findings. First, there is clear evidence of sorting into sectors, with very large differences in worker human capital across the farm and non-farm sectors and...