Specialty crop agriculture may be affected by immigration reform given that most farm workers are foreign-born and unauthorized for U.S. employment. Controlling for selection on legal status and job type according to skill level, this research examines the wage effects for workers with different...

Specialty crop farmers have expressed concern about labor shortages and cost increases which may arise with immigration reform. The large-scale mechanization of the Florida sugarcane harvest during the 1970s/80s serves as an historical example of how technologies evolved due to changes in local...

A cost function approach of induced innovation is used to measure the biases in U.S. agricultural technology between 1969-1999. The rate of technological change is explained by socioeconomic variables. The post-IRCA results show that an increasingly illegal workforce significantly induces...

The prospect of immigration policy reform has renewed growers’ concerns of serious labor shortages and cost increases given that a large portion of the workforce is unauthorized for U.S. employment. This concern of labor shortages and cost increases is more serious for specialty crop...

Immigration reform may significantly impact the specialty crops sector since more than half of the workforce is foreign-born and undocumented. Based on data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey, the trends pertaining to workers' legal status, employment and wage rates in the U.S. and...

As health information technology becomes more prevalent for most healthcare facilities, hospitals across the nation are choosing between performing this service in-house and outsourcing to a technology firm in the health industry. This paper examines factors affecting the information technology...

Outmigration and industrial composition have separately been the focal points of a significant amount of research related to nonmetropolitan counties; however, few (if any) studies have explicitly looked at the relationship between the two topics. The primary objective of this research is to...

This paper takes an empirical approach to determining the effect that a critical access hospital (CAH) has on local retail activity. Previous research on the relationship between hospitals and economic development has primarily focused on single-case, multiplier oriented analysis. The positive...

Rural communities suffer from both supply and demand-side disadvantages when dealing with Internet access. Telecommunications companies are less likely to provide them with needed infrastructure due to lower population densities, and they also tend to have lower levels of specific factors known...

This paper seeks to develop a methodology that will be useful for rural water districts in assessing the future of their water systems infrastructure. In particular, the use of free water simulation software and publicly available data on population, roads, and terrain present rural water...