This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/22/11.

Households in developing countries take various actions to smooth income or consumption as a means of managing or responding to risk. One of the principal means of smoothing income is through the diversification of income sources, including non-farm employment and rural-urban migration. An...

Using a unique dataset of 703,287 farm operators from the Taiwanese Census of Agriculture merged to administrative records from the National Farmers' Health Insurance (FHI) program, we examine the effects of the enrollment in the FHI program on farmers’ on- and off-farm labor supply and the...

Supporters claim that entrepreneurship is critical to building and sustaining the regional economies of urban and rural areas across the nation. Proponents argue that economic development practices that enhance and support entrepreneurship are essential because they cultivate innovation which,...

This study explores occupational and earnings dynamics of rural non-farm economy (RNFE) in Thailand. Using occupational transition matrices, we finds significant occupational transitions in rural Thailand, mainly involving moving to non-farm employment, rather than starting businesses. Moreover,...

This paper assesses the effect of the U.S. Job Corps (JC), the nation's largest and most comprehensive job training program targeting disadvantaged youths, on wages. We employ partial identification techniques and construct informative nonparametric bounds for the causal effect of interest under...

Human capital has been identified as significant determinant of farm size growth. However, there are numerous measures for human capital. Traditional measures include age, experience, and education of the principal operator and a management measure. This study identifies three types of...

The United States dairy industry is heavily dependent on foreign labor. Current and newly proposed U.S. immigration policies have been appointed to disrupt the agricultural labor availability, especially that of hired foreign labor. A national survey of dairy farmers across herd sizes and...

The objective of this paper is to examine whether noncognitive skills explain differences in employment status and hourly wages even after controlling for age, experience, schooling and cognitive skills. Of particular interest is to examine the relative magnitudes of the impacts of the cognitive...