ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the employment of women who own agricultural land is immune to the business cycle. This suggests that agricultural landownership by women may play a role in mitigating the effects of income volatility and, in this way, it supports the case for improving women's land ownership in Africa. Future work might conduct more experimental studies of specific cases and analyse more carefully the role of institutions. A fine extension of the analysis would be to model fertility timing jointly with the timing of women's employment. Further research is also needed on the impact of exogenous changes in the employment of mothers on current and later life outcomes of young children. The literature on household insurance mechanisms in developing countries has considered child labour as an insurance mechanism, but it contains relatively limited investigation of the role of changes in women's labour supply.
