The prospect of immigration policy reform has renewed growers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases. These concerns are more serious for specialty crop agriculture, not only because it is highly labor intensive, but also it requires labor in a very short period, particularly...

Labor and skill premiums and their relationships with trade measures are simultaneously estimated within the framework of an individual level labor supply model for Jamaica using truncated regression models. Increased imports from the US were found to reduce the return to unskilled labor, and...

We have proposed and estimated a Heckman-type two stage model with legal status of farm workers using an ordered probit model in the first stage and a duration model in the second stage. Using the National Agricultural Workers Survey, self-reported legal status categories are: unauthorized,...

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...

A cost function approach of induced innovation is used to measure the biases in U.S. agricultural technology between 1948-1994. The results show significant labor-saving, capital-using technical change. Focusing on the impact of migration policy on labor-saving technology, a simulation of...

A multi-output cost function approach to induced innovation is adopted to analyze the impact of socioeconomic variables and institutional factors on technological change in agriculture. Focusing on the impact of immigration policy and farm mechanization, the study includes variables such as H-2A...

The issue of legalization for unauthorized farm workers is examined in this paper. The analytical framework uses a treatment effects approach which casts legalization as a treatment under the assumption of heterogeneity. The results show an overall positive impact of legalization on farm worker...

The prospect of immigration reform has renewed farmers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases, which may urge highly labor-intensive specialty crop farmers to switch to less-labor-intensive technology. The large-scale mechanization of the Florida sugarcane harvest during the...