Off-Farm Labor Supply and Fertilizer Use
نویسنده
چکیده
I develop a two-period stochastic dynamic programming model to explain the interaction between fertilizer use and off-farm labor supply. I use a well-known sample of farmers in the semi-arid tropics of India to test the model. I find that fertilizer use responds strongly to wages in the village labor market and that irrigation raises fertilizer use, while larger farmers use less fertilizer than smaller ones. Response to one-sided production shocks, which measure effects of negative weather on labor supply, are particularly strong for female labor, indicating that it is more important for smoothing consumption than male labor. Acknowledgements: I thank Jere Behrman, Andrew Foster, Mark Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Skoufias and participants at the 1995 Summer meetings of the American Agricultural Economics Association for helpful discussions on the model and the ICRISAT data. The views reflected are the author’s and not those of the Federal Reserve Board or its staff.
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