Diane Charlton

Stricter immigration policies could drastically reduce US fruit production. Rising farm wages have increased mechanization efforts, but many tasks are still done by hand. This paper reviews recent literature on the current farm labor market conditions and the outlook for automation.

Sudden shocks to labor demand have sometimes been shown to increase local crime rates. We build on this literature by estimating the causal effect of labor‐intensive seasonal agricultural activity on crime. We analyze a unique data set that describes criminal activity and fruit, vegetable, and horticultural (FVH) employment by month and U.S. county from 1990 to 2016. We find that the FVH labor share is associated with reduced property and violent crime rates, and possibly the number of property crimes committed within county years. Examining heterogeneities based on ethnicity, labor‐intensive FVH activity decreases the rate of non‐Hispanic arrests and victimization, and increases the number of Hispanic arrests and victims (consistent with rising local Hispanic populations). Taken together, results are broadly consistent with the idea that agricultural harvest of labor‐intensive crops enhances local labor market opportunities that reduce incentives to commit crimes. Results are robust to a battery of alternative specifications that address the inherent challenges associated with measuring seasonal agricultural labor.

The COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020 caused unprecedented shocks to agricultural food systems, including increased risk to worker health, labor‐related input costs, and production uncertainty. Despite employer precautions, there were numerous worksite outbreaks of COVID‐19. This paper examines the relationship between month‐to‐month variation in historical agricultural employment and changes in the incidence of confirmed COVID‐19 cases and deaths within U.S. counties from April to August 2020. The results show that employment of 100 additional workers in fruit, vegetable, and horticultural production was associated with 4.5% more COVID‐19 cases within counties or an additional 18.65 COVID‐19 cases and 0.34 additional COVID‐19 deaths per 100,000 individuals in the county workforce.

An outbreak of COVID‐19 among farmworkers could have significant impacts on the workers, agricultural producers, and the consumers. Farmers are implementing new labor management practices to slow the spread of the virus among workers. Since immigration is temporarily restricted, farmers may have difficulty securing a sufficient workforce. We test whether changes in the unemployment rate affected H‐2A guest worker demand before the pandemic and find a statistically significant negative impact. Nevertheless, we expect that H‐2A recruitment will be vital to sustaining agricultural production. We conclude by discussing potential long‐term impacts of the pandemic on farm labor supply and demand.

Improving children's access to primary and secondary education is a strategic goal for many global development agencies and government policymakers. Nevertheless, there is relatively little research examining how changes in rural school supply affect future labor markets. We leverage variation in the timing and location of secondary school construction in Southern Mexico to identify the effects of school supply on labor outcomes. We find that school construction increases expected education for school‐aged children by about 4 years and raises the share of years working in the nonagricultural sector between the ages of 18–22 by 29.8 percentage points. The magnitude of the effects on share of years doing nonagricultural work is smaller for individuals from homes where an indigenous language is spoken. Our findings indicate that rural school construction in less‐developed countries can accelerate the transformation from agricultural to nonagricultural economies, but there may be heterogeneous effects across socioeconomic groups and ethnicities.