Market Facilitation Program Payments, Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Coverage and Off-Farm Employment

Ashok K. Mishra (), Alexis Villacis () and Cristina D. M. Miller ()
Additional contact information
Ashok K. Mishra: Arizona State University
Cristina D. M. Miller: U.S. Department of Agriculture

No 15834, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: About two-thirds of U.S. farm households are employed off the farm. Off-farm sources represent 85 percent of the income earned by the average farm household and have turned into their main source of health insurance coverage. Farmers receive various government farm program payments, including the recently added Market Facilitation Program (MFP) payments. These payments have an unintended consequence on labor supply by farm operator households. Using farm household-level data from the 2019 Agricultural Resource Management Survey, this study investigates the impact of employer-sponsored health insurance coverage and participation in MFP on off-farm labor allocation decisions of U.S. farm families. Results from our empirical model show that farm families are 52% more likely to work off the farm if off-farm jobs provide employer-sponsored health insurance coverage. More importantly, results show that MFP payments have a significant and negative effect on the off-farm employment of U.S. farm-operator households.

Keywords: Agricultural Resource Management Survey; government subsidies; employer-sponsored health insurance coverage; off-farm employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C34 I13 J22 J38 J43 Q12 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 34 pages
Date: 2022-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15834.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15834

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().