This study tests whether evidence supports the hypothesis that rural immigrant populations are more sensitive to relative returns to human capital and living costs will be more elastic than those of native-born citizens. An empirically tractable model of incentive to migrate is developed...

This paper examines factors affecting the role of individual, farm production, family finance, and regional characteristics in affecting labor force decisions by farm households. Young, more educated households are much more likely to work off-farm, suggesting that off-farm labor has become an...

Rural communities compete with each other for firms, but their residents often commute large distances to work. Consequently, rural communities can benefit from economic growth occurring as much as 50 miles away. Data on county population growth shows that counties benefit from growth one or two...

This session focuses on farm level labor supply and demand response using various methods of analysis. Off-Farm Work Participation, Off-Farm Labor Supply and On-Farm Labor Demand of U.S. Farm Operators Wallace Huffman, Iowa State University; Hisham El-Osta, USDA/ERS/RED. Estimating the Off-Farm...

Agribusiness firms are increasingly hiring non-agriculture college graduates. Unclear is whether the demand for non-agriculture graduates is predicated on an undersupply of agriculture graduates or if non-agriculture graduates have skills that are not being developed in traditional agriculture...

This study investigates worker shares of the returns to scale and returns to technology adoption on U.S. hog farms. The wage analysis controls for a matching process by which workers are linked to farms of different sizes and technology uses. Using four surveys of employees on hog farms...

Pork production has been evolving from relatively small, family-run operations toward large-scale operations with several employees. This study uses a national survey of pork producers and their employees to answer several questions about the structure of wages and benefits in this rapidly...

Consolidation in the U.S. pork industry continues to reduce the number of operations, while increasing the demand for hired labor. This paper explores how wages have evolved over time by decomposing the increase in wages into a change in the level of wages, human capital, and returns to human...

A utility maximizing framework is used to model how wages, housing prices, and commuting time affect joint decisions of where to live and where to work. The implied multinomial logit model yields plausible estimates of the role of economic variables on joint residence/job location choices.