The Distribution of Income among U.S. Self-Employed Farm Households: A Close Look Before and During COVID-19’s Recession

Hisham S. El-Osta

Applied Economics and Finance, 2023, vol. 10, issue 1, 85104

Abstract: This paper examines the distribution of ‘money’ income of self-employed farm households in the U.S. using multiple inequality measures and multi-year data from Current Population Survey. Special emphasis is given to 2016 and 2020, which portray total household income before and during the onset of the COVID-19’s recession. The two selected years, respectively, characterize low and high farm income years, with their likely divergent impact on the well-being of self-employed farm households. Using the Gini index measure of inequality, findings show that money income was just as unequally distributed in 2020, the year of the COVID-19’s recession, as in 2016. Adopted decomposition method of the Gini index showed income from off-farm wages and/or salaries, in comparison to the other components of total income, with the strongest equalizing marginal impact on the overall distribution of money income in 2016 and with a much lesser impact in 2020. Considering that off-farm income from wages and/or salaries is the dominant income source of self-employed farm households, macroeconomic factors are likely to continue to influence the distribution of income among self-employed farm households.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/download/5822/6025 (application/pdf)
https://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/view/5822 (text/html)

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:rfa:aefjnl:v:10:y:2023:i:1:p:85104

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Applied Economics and Finance from Redfame publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Redfame publishing ().