Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics

Recognizing that people value employment not only to earn income to satisfy their consumption needs, but also as a means to gain socio-psychological (nonpecuniary) benefits, we show that once nonpecuniary work incentives are incorporated into standard labor supply theory, (i) the wage rate under-estimates (over-estimates) the true value of nonwork/leisure time when work has nonpecuniary benefits (costs), (ii) nonpecuniary benefits can be a substitute for monetary wages as work incentives,(iii) at very low wage rates, work can become a net wource of utiltiy, and (iv) the shape of labor supply curve differs from standard theory. We also indentify conditions under which a greater nonpecuniary work incentive generates a larger individual labor supply, and examine the effects of non-wage income on labor supply both for paid and voluntary work.

This paper contributes to the assessment of China's rural labor markets, while paying attention to whether these markets are developing in a manner conducive to the nation's modernization. According to our household survey, we find that the rapid increase in off-farm activity; has become dominated by young and better educated workers; expanded most rapidly in areas that are relatively well-off; and begun to draw workers from portions of the population, such as women, that earlier had been excluded from participation.

In 1944, Marschak and Andrews published a seminal paper on how to obtain consistent estimates of a production technology. The original formulation of the econometric model regarded the joint estimation of the production function together with the first-order necessary conditions for profit-maximizing behavior. In the seventies, with the advent of econometric duality, the preference seemed to have shifted to a dual approach. Recently, however, Mundlak resurrected the primal-versus-dual debate with a provocative paper titled "Production Function Estimation: Reviving the Primal." In that paper, the author asserts that the dual estimator, unlike the primal approach, is not efficient because it fails to utilize all the available information. In this paper we propose that efficient estimates of the production technology can be obtained only by jointly estimating all the relevant primal and dual relations. Thus, the primal approach of Mundlak and the dual approach of McElroy become special cases of the general specification. In the process of putting to rest the primal-versus-dual debate, we tackle also the nonlinear errors-in-variables problem when all the variables are measured with error. A Monte Carlo analysis of this problem indicates that the proposed estimator is robust to misspecifications of the ratio between error variances.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic's first wave led to declining mental health and life satisfaction outcomes for college students, especially women. While women in undergraduate agricultural programs outperformed men academically prior to and during the pandemic, the achievement may have come at personal cost, especially for those women with fewer personal and environmental resiliency resources. Our research objective was to expand on personal, social, and environmental factors linked with lower mental health and life satisfaction scores for students in agriculture during the pandemic. We measured the influence of such factors across gender-based mental health and life satisfaction outcomes. Our data were collected from 2030 students using an on-line survey across six land-grant university college of agriculture in agriculturally as many distinct regions of the United States. We estimated OLS and Ordered Probit models of their mental health and life satisfaction self-assessments. Our findings reveal students' mental health and life satisfaction were reduced due to a paucity of personal (e.g., less future orientation or graduate school aspirations, food and housing insecurity, and personal health risks) and environmental (e.g., lower quality on-line learning experiences, isolation, family health risk, discrimination experiences) resiliency resources. Our results suggest women were more likely than men to be adversely affected by reduced resiliency resources. These findings suggest university emergency response policies need to address students' needs for housing and food security, on-line course development and delivery, tele health and mental health resources, broad social inclusion and diversity to decrease risk of female attrition and support all students in agricultural degree programs.

1. Biofuel Policies: Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

Policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions from transportation have hit major obstacles in the past few years. In effect, these policies take money from petroleum producers and give it to renewable fuel producers, creating heated political and legal battles but little effect on consumers.

2. Which California Foods You Consume Makes Little Impact on Drought-Relevant Water Usage

To be relevant to California’s drought, discussions of water used to produce food items should focus on the irrigation water relevant to production in California. By that measure, drought-relevant water used to produce livestock products such as beef and milk is moderate compared to crop products such as wine and broccoli.

3. Europe's Migration Crisis

The European Union’s 28 member nations received 1.2 million applications from asylum seekers in 2015. One reason for the upsurge in asylum applicants is that German Chancellor Angela Merkel in August 2015 announced that Syrians could apply for asylum in Germany even if they passed through safe countries en route. The challenges of integrating asylum seekers are becoming clearer, prompting talk of reducing the influx, reforming EU institutions, and integrating migrants.

Recognizing that people value employment not only to earn income to satisfy their consumption needs, but also as a means to gain socio-psychological (nonpecuniary) benefits, we show that once nonpecuniary work incentives are incorporated into standard labor supply theory, (i) the wage rate under-estimates (over-estimates) the true value of nonwork/leisure time when work has nonpecuniary benefits (costs), (ii) nonpecuniary benefits can be a substitute for monetary wages as work incentives,(iii) at very low wage rates, work can become a net wource of utiltiy, and (iv) the shape of labor supply curve differs from standard theory. We also indentify conditions under which a greater nonpecuniary work incentive generates a larger individual labor supply, and examine the effects of non-wage income on labor supply both for paid and voluntary work.