THE JOINT LABOUR DECISIONS OF FARM COUPLES: A CENSORED RESPONSE ANALYSIS OF ON-FARM AND OFF-FARM WORK

Farm couples' labour market responses are partly the qualitative choice of entering the ff-farm labour market and partly the continuous choice of the number of on-farm and off-farm working hours, given entry. Such a setting is interesting when examining the increasing occurrence of multiple job-holdings among farmers in western economies. This paper presents a unified framework for handling such discrete/continuous choices, involving optimisation of farm production, household consumption, and multiple job-holdings for both husband and wife. A two-equation censoring panel data model is implemented and estimated from Norwegian panel data for 342 farms observed over a ten-year period.