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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants and impacts of outsourcing pest and disease management on rice production in China.

A multinomial endogenous treatment effects model which accounts for selection bias was used.

The results show that outsourcing decisions are driven mainly by the size of the farm, the age of the household head and other household characteristics. Further, the authors find that outsourcing labor for pest and disease control has no significant effect on pest control cost and rice yields, though it reduces the number of pesticide applications. Conversely, outsourcing of professional services can increase rice yields by 4.1 percent, and at the same time it increases pest and disease control costs by 50.6 percent. However, it is found that outsourcing of professional services exerts no significant impact on the farm profitability.

This study suggests that households with large farm size are more likely to outsource professional services and, therefore, service providers and governments should target those farmers to provide incentives and create greater awareness of the benefits from the outsourcing of professional services. Moreover, the increase in yields along with the government subsidy justifies the outsourcing of professional services by farmers. However, service providers and policy makers have a lot of leeway to come up with cheaper methods for pest and disease management in rice production.

This study is the first attempt to simultaneously evaluate the determinants and impacts of outsourcing pest and disease management on rice production in China.

This paper analysed survey data of 715 rice-producing households in China to assess the determinants of adoption of five mutually exclusive soil conservation practices (SCPs) and their impact on rice yield and chemical fertiliser use.

The multinomial endogenous treatment effects model was used to account for selection bias and endogeneity arising from both observed and unobserved heterogeneity.

Farms that adopted SCPs as a package experienced an increase in rice yield and decrease in chemical fertiliser use. Adoption of SCPs as a package led to a 12.0% increase in yield and 15.2% decrease in chemical fertiliser use; these results have policy implications for the non-point source pollution control in the agricultural sector. In contrast, adoption of straw retention only significantly reduced yield by 4.9% and increased chemical fertiliser use by 18.1%.

The authors evaluate and compare multi-type of SCPs, such as straw retention, deep tillage and use of organic fertiliser, separately or in combination, and their impacts on smallholder farmers’ rice yield and chemical fertiliser usage.

This study aims at exploring the choices of livelihood strategies amongst the rural youth and how these choices relate to food security and income poverty.

The study used data from the 2016/17 wave of Integrated Household Living Condition Survey, with a sample size of 1,050 rural youths. Statistical and econometrics methods including descriptive statistics and the Multinomial Endogenous Treatment Effect (METE) model were used to analyse the data.

Livelihood choices were grouped into five categories, namely agriculture, non-farm wage employment, agriculture plus non-farm wage, agriculture plus self-employment and agriculture plus non-farm wage plus self-employment. The estimates from METE indicate that the youths' choice of non-farm wage, agriculture plus non-farm wage and agriculture plus self-employment contributes substantially to household food security improvement and poverty reduction. These findings show that agriculture is necessary but not a sufficient livelihood strategy to sustain the rural youth's contribution to youth's household welfare. The rural youth will pursue agriculture as a reliable source of livelihood not only for food self-sufficiency, but also for ensuring adequate return to labour.

This paper extends single choice analysis to multiple choices impact analysis, which has the advantage of accounting for selection bias due to both observed and unobserved heterogeneity. This paper assesses the differential impact of the choice of single as well as multiple livelihood strategies.

This paper investigates the effects of working during university education on labour market outcomes of university graduates.

Based on data from three successive cohorts of graduates from the Spanish region of Catalonia, the authors estimate the effect of having worked in different types of jobs before graduation, classified according to work intensity and the match with the field of study, on the probability of being employed, having a permanent contract or having a job that requires the specific degree four years after graduation. The authors employ a multinomial endogenous treatment model that enables controlling for self-selection into pre-graduation working activities.

Pre-graduation work activities that are related to the field of study are generally beneficial for employability and job stability. Work experiences unmatched with the degree's content are detrimental for graduates' job–education match.

This is the first paper that jointly considers the role of work intensity (part-time vs full-time) and the relationship with the field of study in a framework that accounts for self-selection into different types of jobs. The authors also contribute to the literature by estimating the effect of pre-graduation jobs not only on the chances of being employed four years after graduation but also on two important aspects of job quality: having a permanent contract and having a job that requires the specific degree.

This paper contributes to the empirical analysis of PhD holders' transition into the non-academic labor market (i.e. their intersectoral mobility). The research focuses on doctoral graduates specialized in a field of study supposed to have notable non-academic applications, namely Industrial and Information Engineering. We inspect whether these doctoral graduates experience lower satisfaction with PhD knowledge use on the job when they work outside universities and non-public research centers.

We use cross-sectional survey data collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics in 2014. Ordinary least squares and ordered logit analyses provide baseline results; furthermore, we apply a multinomial endogenous treatment model to control for potential bias arising from self-selection into employment sectors.

We find evidence that for PhD holders Industrial and Information Engineering being employed in the industrial and services sector implies lower satisfaction with the use of doctoral knowledge than that reported by their counterparts working in universities or public research centers.

These results complement and extend previous evidence about PhD holders' career outcomes by focusing on the intersectoral mobility issue and on a specific group of doctoral graduates whose intersectoral mobility potential is expected to be high. Our findings call for policies that might trigger a better alignment between doctoral education and non-academic jobs.

This study examined the effects of adopting dairy feed technology bundles on the milk production of smallholder dairy farmers.

The study was based on Multinomial Endogenous Switching Regression (MESR) to estimate the effects of the adoption of three feed technology bundles on milk production using data collected from 518 dairy farm households in West Java, Indonesia.

The findings indicated that adopting technology bundles had positive and robust effects on milk production, with gradual positive effects between non-adoption and the adoption of different bundles of technologies.

This study focused on the association between the adoption of feed technology bundles and milk production. However, further analysis of the causal links between the adoption of feed technologies and milk production as well as the inclusion of other outcomes in the analysis, such as production costs and risk mitigation, are required.

Most of the literature on agricultural technology adoption focuses on the adoption of individual technologies, crop farming and conservation practices. Therefore, this study examined the effects of the adoption of dairy feed technology bundles.

As rural nonfarm activities grow in developing countries, less attention is being paid to the opportunities they may provide for women. The purpose of this study is to examine the gender-differentiated impact of nonfarm diversification strategies in rural Senegal.

This study uses data collected from the Senegalese poverty monitoring survey and employs an instrumental variable (IV) approach and a multinomial endogenous treatment model to investigate the extent to which diversification strategies lead to improved outcomes for rural women and their households.

While nonfarm diversification is a male-dominated livelihood strategy, rural women make the most of it, regardless of whether they diversify into low- or high-return nonfarm activities. At the individual level, diversification improves rural women’s well-being through large income-increasing effects and higher empowerment but has no effect on rural men’s well-being. At the household level, the authors find that, when only women diversify, households have lower per capita income but are less likely to be food insecure than when only men or both genders diversify.

This study is based on cross-sectional data, making it impossible to examine the dynamic effects of nonfarm diversification strategies on well-being outcomes.

This study contributes to the current literature on rural livelihood diversification. While much attention has been paid to the feminization of agriculture, remarkably little is known about the expanding role of rural women in the nonfarm sector.

Peers and friends are among the most influential social forces affecting adolescent behavior. In this chapter, the authors investigate peer effects on post high school career decisions and on school choice. The authors define peers as students who are in the same classes and social clubs and measure peer effects as spatial dependence among them. Utilizing recent developments in spatial econometrics, the authors formalize a spatial multinomial choice model in which individuals are spatially dependent in their preferences. The authors estimate the model via pseudo maximum likelihood using data from the Texas Higher Education Opportunity Project. The authors do find that individuals are positively correlated in their career and college preferences and examine how such dependencies impact decisions directly and indirectly as peer effects are allowed to reverberate through the social network in which students reside.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the determinants of marketing contract choices including written contracts, oral contracts and no contracts, as well as to examine the impact of marketing contracts on net returns from apple production in China.

A two-stage selection correction approach (Bourguignon, Fournier, and Gurgand (BFG)) for the multinomial logit model is employed to estimate the impact of marketing contracts on net returns from apple production. On the basis of the BFG estimation, the authors also use an endogenous switching regression model and a propensity score matching technique to estimate the causal effects of marketing contract choices on net returns from apple production.

The results reveal significant selectivity correction terms in the choices of both written contracts and no contracts and insignificant selectivity correction terms in the choice of oral contract, indicating that accounting for selection bias is a prerequisite for unbiased and consistent estimation. The findings also indicate written contracts increase apple farmers’ net returns, while oral contracts exert the opposite effect.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the impact of marketing contract choices on net returns from apple production, accounting for selectivity effects.

This paper reviews the current literature on theoretical and methodological issues in discrete choice experiments, which have been widely used in non-market value analysis, such as elicitation of residents' attitudes toward recreation or biodiversity conservation of forests.

We review the literature, and attribute the possible biases in choice experiments to theoretical and empirical aspects. Particularly, we introduce regret minimization as an alternative to random utility theory and sheds light on incentive compatibility, status quo, attributes non-attendance, cognitive load, experimental design, survey methods, estimation strategies and other issues.

The practitioners should pay attention to many issues when carrying out choice experiments in order to avoid possible biases. Many alternatives in theoretical foundations, experimental designs, estimation strategies and even explanations should be taken into account in practice in order to obtain robust results.

The paper summarizes the recent developments in methodological and empirical issues of choice experiments and points out the pitfalls and future directions both theoretically and empirically.