The role of farm size has recently come to the forefront of agricultural development debates. Agricultural development policy often focuses on small farms given evidence of their role in poverty reduction and of higher yields. Yet policy has also focused on large farms due to their share of...

The planning of mechanization requires the quantitative assessment of a mechanization index and the impact of this index on agricultural yield and economic factors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the adoption of agricultural mechanization and scale production on labour...

In this paper we make a two-fold contribution. We first examine the impact of agricultural subsidies on Greece, using a detailed, micro-panel dataset for four years, 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014. Our analysis is illuminating at least two aspects of subsidies: first, it suggests that an incentive...

We decompose the impact of trade reform on technology adoption and land use to study how aggregate changes were driven by reallocation versus within-farm adaptation. Using detailed census data covering over 30,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada we find a range of new...

Using detailed census data covering over 40,000 farms in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, Canada, we document the vast and increasing farm size heterogeneity, and analyze the role of farm size in adapting to the removal of an export subsidy in 1995. We find that larger farms were more likely...

What patterns can be discerned in the distribution of farm sizes across countries and over time? How does the behavior of individual economic agents interact with the natural environment and general economic development to affect farm size? How has concerted human intervention, understood as...

Small farms are the largest employment and small business group among the poor. Their businesses use mostly labor and local resources and face local constraints, but at the same time, they are affected by increasingly complex national and global economic changes, which lead to shifts in...

This paper shows that using yields may not be informative of the relationship between farm size and productivity in the context of small-scale farming. This occurs because, in addition to productivity, yields pick up size-dependent market distortions and decreasing returns to scale. As a result,...

We assess the development economics of on-farm employment with an eye toward policy implications. What do we know and what additional research is needed? The older tradition of labor market dualism and some of the more modern research are seen to share a characteristic of misplaced exogeneity,...