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Presentation ID 16422

This article analyzes issues related to the U.S. farm workers’ utilization to health care services and their specific choices among health care provider and health bill payment method options. Our findings validate the significant influence of health insurance coverage on health care access, and emphasize the reality of constrained access due to federal regulations, among other factors, prevalent among immigrant farm worker groups, who have relatively lower probability of using health care than citizen farm workers. Moreover, as most farm workers patronize private clinics and community health centers, they usually are also left only with the option to settle health care bills with out-of-pocket funds.

In addition to direct compensation (salaries and bonuses), fringe benefits such as employer-provided health insurance (EPHI) may also influence an individual’s decisions on actual and expected employment duration. This study analyzes the potential of EPHI in job retention among documented and undocumented farm workers in the United States at a time period when the farm sector is experiencing labor shortage crisis attributed to stricter immigration controls. In this study, farm worker-level data was preprocessed using Coarsened Exact Matching and analyzed under an ordered probit model. The results indicate that documented farm workers are generally responsive to EPHI in terms of both their actual employment duration and subjective working expectations. However, the EPHI did not significantly influence the subjective work expectations of undocumented farm workers. Moreover, the results imply that EPHI could not possibly be an effective tool for retaining undocumented workers on the farm once they are legalized.

Changes in agricultural population can significantly influence the progress of mechanization, which provides efficient momentum to the further development of agriculture. We examine the effect of the declining agricultural population on mechanization and determine the variables that have decisive power over mechanical adoption decisions. This analysis of a panel data of top six out-migration provinces in China under a fixed effect model, we find that the overly fast and unusual decline in agricultural population actually slowed down the progress of mechanization, and the many years of large scale out-migration encouraged by government actually jeopardized sustainable agricultural development. Results underscore the need for considerable attention on the growth of annual farm incomes and agricultural products import that could have substantial effects on agricultural mechanization decisions.

This paper studies the factors influence the labor decisions of agricultural labor in the U.S. and finds the distinction among the three types of agricultural workers. Undocumented farmers are unresponsive to wage changes while other farmers are not; enhanced education decreases the probability of exiting farm for foreign-born farmers.