A limited-dependent analysis of the choice of regular labour contract in seasonal agriculture

Sarmistha Pal

Applied Economics, 1998, vol. 30, issue 10, 1347-1359

Abstract: The paper examines both theoretically and empirically the factors determining the demand for regular labour in seasonal agriculture. In an implicit contract framework it is argued that there are 'hoarding costs' of regular labour in the slack period when there is not much work to be done. Consequently, the number of regular labour employed is constrained by the hoarding cost where larger employment-intensive farms tend to hire more regular labour. Evidence from the ICRISAT villages in India, too, show that though the marginal costs of regular labour are zero, there are significant hoarding costs of regular labour among small farms so that larger farmers are the major demanders of regular labour. Estimates of the double-hurdle model jointly determining the probability of hiring regular labour and demand for regular labour-hours (if a regular labour is hired) are shown to be an improvement over univariate tobit estimates of the demand for regular labour-hours only.

Date: 1998
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/000368498324968 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:applec:v:30:y:1998:i:10:p:1347-1359

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/000368498324968

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().