Income Targeting and Farm Labor Supply

Timothy J. Richards

American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2020, vol. 102, issue 2, 419-438

Abstract: There is considerable anecdotal evidence that farm workers who are paid by piece rate tend to “income target,” or work only until they achieve a certain amount of daily income, and then stop work. We estimate reduced‐form and structural models derived from the reference‐dependent preference model of Koszegi and Rabin (2006) to test the income‐targeting hypothesis using data from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). We find evidence that supports the income‐targeting hypothesis, in both the reduced‐form and structural econometric models. Our findings suggest that even higher piece rates may not help the widely reported shortage of agricultural labor on the intensive margin as labor‐supply curves can be backward bending.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/ajae.12032

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:wly:ajagec:v:102:y:2020:i:2:p:419-438

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Journal of Agricultural Economics from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().