This paper elucidates the implications of transaction costs in agrarian labor hiring activities in a two-sector model of international trade and identifies a link between the size distribution of land and intersectoral allocation of productive inputs. Ceteris paribus, a more unequal distribution...

The welfare of workers in rural areas is highly affected by agricultural output volatility, caused in part by weather shocks. A volatile source of income is an important factor in inducing migration. While the impact of rainfall shocks on migration is well studied, the channels through which...

By 2017, one-quarter of people born in El Salvador were estimated to be living in the U.S. We show that extreme temperatures have negatively affected agricultural production and increased international migration from El Salvador. We find that labor markets act as a transmission mechanism of the...

This study assesses how the transfer of rural labor to non-farm sectors affects China’s national economy and the role the agricultural sector plays with respect to rural-urban migration. Econometric models using official Chinese statistics are used to: evaluate the marginal productivities of...

Production function studies have used the education of the head of the household or the average education of farm workers to assess the contribution of schooling to farm efficiency. This paper critically examines the information content of these measures by developing a team production model...

Farm households in modern environments engage in multiple productive activities. In this paper we formulate and estimate a profit maximization model in which human capital enhances earnings through both activity-specific effects and across-activity factor allocation. Our purpose is to decompose...

There is some indirect evidence that the absence of markets might cause child labor. However the existing literature is silent on whether marginal improvements of the markets functioning would reduce child labor. This paper models rural households’ labor supply when the degree of imperfections...

This paper explores the underlying mechanism in the rural labor market that leads to income growth and poverty reduction in the rural areas of the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Increase in nonfarm income, most importantly coming from formal jobs, has served as an important...

This paper studies the effects of remittances from the U.S. on child labor and school attendance in recipient Mexican households. We identify these effects using the impact of the 2008–2009 U.S. recession on remittance receipts. The methodology employed is a differences-in-differences strategy...

Employment is widely perceived as being amongst the most important channels for translating growth into poverty reduction. This paper focuses on two countries, Burkina Faso and Vietnam , with very distinct patterns of growth and poverty reduction between 1993-2003. We use household survey data...