If farmers are risk averse, greater farm income variability should increase off-farm labor supply. This effect is confirmed for a sample of Kansas farmers. Off-farm employment of farmers and their spouses is also found to be significantly influenced by farm experience, off-farm work experience, farm size, leverage, efficiency, and farm-specific education. In addition, farm operators and spouses...

The goal of this paper is to examine how has the expansion of the economy after 2000 affected rural off-farm labor market participation. Specifically, we seek to determine whether off-farm labor increased after 2000, what forms of employment are driving trends in off-farm labor, and whether gender differences can be observed in off-farm employment trends. Using a nationally representative datas...

Income from off-farm sources is especially important for land-poor households. However, the pattern of participation in off-farm activities is heterogeneous across space. We explore the determinants of participation in off-farm non-agricultural employment using data for rural Mexico. In particular, we try to understand how the neighborhood and the neighbors’ characteristics and choices affect t...

The goal of the present paper is to examine how the expansion of the economy from 2000 has affected rural off-farm labor market participation. Specifically, we seek to determine whether off-farm labor increased after 2000, what forms of employment are driving trends in off-farm labor and whether gender differences can be observed in offfarm employment trends. Using a nationally representative d...

Using three-wave survey data for four villages of Jiangsu Province in China, the present paper examines whether and to what extent off-farm employment affects the technical efficiency of agricultural production. The level of technical efficiency is measured using a stochastic frontier production function approach. Based on estimation results from instrumental variable panel quantile regressions...

This paper examines the impacts of off-farm employment on irrigation water efficiency (IWE) with a set of household level data collected in Hebei Province in North China. A major finding is that households with higher shares of laborers working off-farm locally seem to achieve higher IWEs. The effect of local off-farm employment is greater among those households that have made more efforts to u...

This article joins the debate over the effect of market-driven economic development on women’s work opportunities and household gender inequalities. It assesses women’s opportunities for off-farm employment, the relative contributions of female off-farm workers to household income, and the distribution of power in families whose male members have left for off-farm jobs, leaving women behind in ...

Introduction The objective of this chapter is to investigate the relationship between the growth of off-farm employment opportunities and educational attainment in rural China. Since the beginning of the reform era in the late-1970's off-farm employment has surged and education levels have risen dramatically. However, a persistent gap has formed between rural and urban areas, both in terms of i...