Financial stress in agriculture has been a concern over the past
century. Agrarian values and "love of the land" seem to yield public
conclusions for the support of the industry. Much of this support is
in the interest of preserving a viable food producing sector in an
volatile world climate. High interest rates, declining land values
and highly competitive export markets have spurred renewed concern
for farm survival in the past ten years.
One alternative to traditional price supports and tariffs for
farm household support is off-farm income. This may take many forms
including off-farm wages and salaries, rental income, interest and
dividend income and, retirement or pension funds. Central to the
analysis of nonfarm income generation is the allocation of time by
farm households. For farmers who place a high value on the farm
lifestyle, occupational choice is embedded in the time decision to
such an extent that the resource allocations based on economic efficiency
criteria may be altered.
Tobit techniques offer a new approach to the analysis of farm
household decisions on time allocation. The procedure allows the investigator
to estimate and evaluate parameters that may affect the
amount of off-farm work by farm household members. The Tobit
analysis is designed for censored data sets. The data in this study
were censored because there were missing observations on the quantity
of off-farm work for those individuals who did not work off-farm in
1986.
Results of Tobit analyses of off-farm work by farm operators and
spouses in three Oregon counties indicated that high levels of gross
farm income reduce the likelihood and extent of off-farm work.
Middle-aged operators worked off-farm more while the presence of
small children and elderly dependents in the farm household inhibited
off-farm work. The allocation decisions of the spouse and the
operator appeared to be independent; this supports a nonsimultaneous
Tobit specification like the one used in this research. / Graduation date: 1988
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/26852 |
| Date | 10 August 1987 |
| Creators | Doyle, Douglas J., 1963- |
| Contributors | Stevens, Joe B. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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