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Within the framework of potential efforts and strategies to employment generation for young people in Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, the agricultural sector is increasingly considered as an important sector and a valuable means for poverty reduction, the promotion of economic development, and youth's economic independence. Renewed hope is placed on the sector to offer sustainable livelihood prospects for the rural youth. Yet, the success and sustainability of the sector require a proper understanding of how households allocate youth labor time in the sector and whether agricultural labor supply is responsive to economic incentives such as shadow wages. Using gender- and age-specific plot-level panel data, we systematically analyze the impacts of shadow wages of each household member on youth agricultural labor supply across types of farms. The results indicate that agricultural shadow wages matter for the youth's labor supply in the sector, but the impact differs for male and female youth. We also show that trends and patterns of youth labor supply vary across gender and whether they work on their own farm, and so do their labor returns. The results are consistent after controlling for individual heterogeneity and instrumenting for possible endogeneity. Taking into account the intensity of youth's actual involvement in the family farm, own farm or off-farm work instead of their stated intentions, the results challenge the presumption that youth are abandoning agriculture, at least in agricultural potential areas of Ethiopia. Instead, the frequent narrative of youth disengaging from agriculture may be a result of methodological flaws or data limitations. The findings suggest that it is necessary to invest in agricultural development to enhance labor productivity and employability of young people in agriculture.

We develop and estimate an empirical collective model with endogenous marriage formation, participation, and family labor supply. Intra-household transfers arise endogenously as the transfers that clear the marriage market. The intra-household allocation can be recovered from observations on marriage decisions. Introducing the marriage market in the collective model allows us to independently estimate transfers from labor supplies and from marriage decisions. We estimate a semiparametric version of our model using 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census data. Estimates of the model using marriage data are much more consistent with the theoretical predictions than estimates derived from labor supply.

This paper aims to investigate whether shocks to the health of a self‐employed worker in Brazil increase the labour supply of other household members.

Using data from the Brazilian National Household Survey, this paper investigates whether the probability of other household members entering the labour force increases as a reaction to a decrease in income caused by the absence from work due to health problems of a head of household who is self‐employed.

The empirical evidence indicates that absence of the head of household from work due to health problems seems to increase the probability of other household members entering the labour force.

The paper provides evidence regarding the consequences of negative shocks to the health of self‐employed workers on households' labour supply decisions in Brazil.

Credit is central in labour allocation decisions in smallholder agriculture in developing countries. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of credit constraints on farm households’ labour allocation decisions in rural Burkina Faso.

The study used a direct elicitation approach of credit constraints and applied a farm household model to categorize households into four labour market participation regimes. A joint estimation of both the multinomial logit model and probit model was applied on survey data from Burkina Faso to assess the effect of credit constraint on the probability of choosing one of the four alternatives.

The results of the probit model showed that households’ endowment of livestock, access to news, and membership to an farmer-based organization were factors lowering the probability of being credit constrained in rural Burkina Faso. The multinomial logit model results showed that credit constraints negatively influenced the likelihood of a farm household to use hired labour in agricultural production and perhaps more importantly it induces farm households to hire out labour off farm. The results also showed that the other components of household characteristics and farm attributes are important factors determining the relative probability of selecting a particular labour market participation regime.

Facilitating access to credit in rural Burkina Faso can encourage farm households to use hired labour in agricultural production and thereby positively impacting farm productivity and relieving unemployment pressures.

In order to identify the effect of credit constraints on farm households’ labour decisions, this study examined farm households’ decisions of hiring on-farm labour, supplying labour off-farm or simultaneously hiring on-farm labour and supplying family labour off-farm under credit constraints using the direct elicitation approach of credit constraints. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine this problem in Burkina Faso.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ability of monetary policy to generate real effects in laboratory general equilibrium production economies.

To understand why monetary policy is not consistently effective at stabilizing economic activity, the author vary the types of agents interacting in the economy and consider treatments where subjects are playing the role of households (firms) in an economy where automated firms (households) are programmed to behave rationally.

While the majority of participants’ expectations respond to monetary policy in the direction intended, subjects do form expectations adaptively, relying heavily on past variables and forecasts in forming two-steps-ahead forecasts. Moreover, in the presence of counterparts that are boundedly rational, forecast accuracy worsens significantly. When interacting with automated households, updating firms’ prices respond modestly to monetary policy and significantly to anticipated marginal costs and future prices. The greatest deviations in behavior from theoretical predictions arise from human households (HH). Households persistent oversupply of labor and under-consumption is attributed to precautionary saving and debt aversion. The results provide evidence that the effects of monetary policy on decision making hinge on the distribution of indebtedness of households.

The author present causal evidence of the effects of potential bounded rationality on agents’ consumption and labor decisions.

To determine the factors that motivate rural households to supply ganyu labor and to estimate its impact on food security.

Data from the 2010/2011 Malawi household survey were used. A probit model to evaluate the determinants of ganyu labor supply and a propensity score-matching estimator to assess its impact on food security were used.

Less educated males are more likely to supply ganyu labor. Ganyu labor supply increases with household size, while it decreases with the level of crop farming and size of land owned. Results from the average treatment effect indicate a positive and significant impact of ganyu labor participation on the number of meals consumed per day.

Ganyu labor participants in Malawi have better access to food as a result of cash income from ganyu. Government support mechanisms such as minimum wage regulations should consider the welfare of ganyu labor participants.

The aim of this paper is to address a local separability character partly identified by non‐farm participation behaviors in the context of multiple market imperfections.

The paper develops a model to analyze agricultural household's non‐farm participation based on heterogeneous asset endowments. The model is applied to recent data from Zhouzhi, a mountainous county in rural western China.

The paper shows that human capital, social capital and other capital assets have significant but different effects on the agricultural household's participation in non‐farm activities, and they help to break down non‐farm labor constraints. Nonseparability holds only for those households unable to participate in non‐farm activities due to poor asset endowments.

The agricultural household model developed in this paper and its application in China provide insights into theory and empirical analysis of agricultural households' behavior and rural development.