This dissertation consists of three essays, exploring (1) the potential disruptive effects of seafood mislabeling (2) how rural nonfarm employment (RNFE) conditions the relationship between agricultural diversification and aquaculture efficiency, and (3) the impact of parental education on child time use.The first chapter, titled "Fish demand in the U.S. Great Lakes region in the face of seafood mislabeling" investigates whether consumer WTP for local seafood is impacted by information about seafood fraud. The globalization of seafood trade has triggered heightened vulnerability for fraud within the seafood supply network. Consumer perceptions of these vulnerabilities are not limited to imported seafood products, as spillover effects are likely to influence purchasing behavior for domestically produced seafood as well. Applying a discrete choice methodology, I show that consumers derive positive utility from consuming locally sourced relative to imported seafood. Upon further disaggregation, however, I find that for one consumer segment, which I term the price-sensitive group, localness does not command a significant positive premium. Most importantly, I demonstrate that information regarding international seafood fraud largely did not alter local seafood demand. That said, I find some evidence of a negative spillover effect of the information treatment on US-labeled seafood in one consumer subgroup.The second chapter, titled "Does rural nonfarm employment (RNFE) resolve (or exacerbate) the agricultural diversification-farm efficiency tradeoff?" studies how RNFE conditions the relationship between agricultural diversification and fish efficiency? Competitionfor scare productive resources typically implies a compromise between agricultural diversification and efficiency. Yet the potential for nonfarm income to resolve this tradeoff remains understudied. Cash from nonfarm sources may support productivity-enhancing input purchase, thereby improving efficiency. On the other hand, by diversifying both on and off-farm, households may be spreading their labor resources too thin, thus lowering fish efficiency. Using micro-level data on fish farming households in Southern Bangladesh, I show that at higher levels of the nonfarm income share, diversification into crops results in significant allocative inefficiencies. Results are weaker for the technical efficiency measure.The third chapter, titled "Parental educational attainment and child labor outcomes: Evidence from Malawi" revisits a hot-button topic-child labor use in agricultural production. Prior studies present anecdotal evidence thus far with evidence on the causal interpretation of this relationship rarely explored. I draw on insights from the demography literature, wherein findings suggest that the direct influence of grandparents or lack thereof on grandchildren's socioeconomic outcomes hinges crucially on familial living arrangements. Hence, conditional on a range of parental characteristics and multigenerational co-residence, I use as a set of instruments grandparents' educational attainment to exploit plausibly exogenous variation in parents' schooling. Using a nationally representative Malawian household panel data set, I generally find evidence of a negative parental educational attainment impact on child labor outcomes. The effect of maternal education on household farm work, however, is not significant. My 2SLS results are also shown to be robust to varying degrees of violation of the exclusion restriction. With respect to potential mechanisms, the results suggest that engagement in nonfarm employment pursuits among educated parents may mediate these effects.
Read
