Research on agricultural development in China has increasingly paid attention to the potentially negative effects of highly fragmented farm structures. This study provides a deeper theoretical understanding of the linkages between land fragmentation and off-farm labor supply and investigates this relationship empirically in a more direct and robust way than in the existing literature. Drawing upon a rural household panel dataset collected in Zhejiang, Hubei and Yunnan provinces from 1995-2002, we estimate the effects in two steps. First, we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on labor productivity using a time-demeaned translog production function. Second, we estimate the effect of land fragmentation on off-farm labor supply using Wooldridge’s (1995)... |