FINDING SOLUTIONS TO LABOR CHALLENGES THAT PROMOTE FOOD SUPPLY CHAIN RESILIENCE IN THE UNITED STATES

Objective: Our overall objective is to conduct an empirical investigation into a set of key labormarket challenges facing the domestic food supply chain and identify a set of market and policyoptions that could help resolve them. We organize our research into the following six stages, eachbuilding on and supporting the proposal's theme.Stage 1: Determine whether a post-Great Recession structural shift in Mexico-US migration isresponsible for the recent spike in demand for H-2A employees and quantify the extent to whichdeclining domestic farm employment is being replenished by H-2A labor.Stage 2: Estimate the effect of the H-2A visa program's Adverse Effect Wage Rate (i.e., theH-2A minimum wage) on the wages of non-H-2A farmworkers and quantify the economic impactsof changing existing H-2A program mandates.Stage 3: Estimate the impacts of the declining domestic farm labor supply on domestic FVproduction and the demand for imported FV crops. Provide a risk assessment about potentialsupply chain disruptions on domestic food supplies and identify policy options that could reducerisk exposure.Stage 4: Examine the impact of labor-market concentration on wages while recognizing theendogeneity of concentration and the inherent difficulty of defining "markets" for labor that maybe fungible across industries and space.Stage 5: Develop a theoretical model that explains how healthcare coverage influences labormarket outcomes such as employee productivity, duration of employment and unemployment, andnegotiated wages, as well as employer profits. Test the empirical implications of our model usingreduced-form treatment effect regression models and a structural econometric model of job search,matching, and bargaining.Stage 6: Synthesize our theoretical and empirical findings to suggest a range of policy solutions,or improvements to current policies, that can promote food supply chain resilience in the US.