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Title: Who works “in town" and why? Off-farm Labor and Farm Viability

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: Off-farm work has increasingly become a crucial component of US farms’ risk management strategy, and is credited with closing the income gap between US farm and non-farm households (Mishra and Chang, 2012). This study addresses how off-farm income earned by the farm spouse (almost always a woman) and the farm operator (almost always male) differentially affects farm financial viability. I use a measure of Chinese manufacturing import penetration based on Autor et al. (2018) as a plausibly exogenous measure of changing offfarm opportunities for men and women. Farm-level data, aggregated up to the commuting zone level, come from the Agricultural and ResourceManagement Survey (ARMS), which includes data on household structure and off-farm income sources and hours for both the primary operator and his spouse. This study is among the first to examine a deterministic relationship between gender-differentiated off-farm labor and the ways in which farm’s manage their finances in the United States. It provides evidence that there are potential unintended consequences for the expansion of the federal farm safety net and that farm households accept a financial penalty in order for the primary operator to remain male.

Url: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/290975/files/Abstracts_19_05_15_22_07_19_97__67_241_72_234_0.pdf

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Authors: Jodlowski, Margaret

Publisher: Cornell University

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization, Other

Countries: United States