Why do rural households keep labor in farming when non-farm opportunities offer higher returns? We argue that one reason is guard labor—labor kept in agriculture to protect land rights under insecure tenure. Using household panel data from the China Family Database (CFD) and the staggered rollout of China’s land titling reform, we estimate the effect of certification on household agricultural labor. Land certification reduces household agricultural labor, and the decline is larger among households that expected land readjustment before the reform. These results are consistent with a guard-labor mechanism: under insecure tenure, some farm labor is retained to protect land claims rather than to raise production. Secure tenure relaxes this motive and facilitates labor reallocation out of agriculture.
Wang et al. (Wed,) studied this question.