Growing farm size has generally been explained by technological advances that have allowed farmers to substitute capital for labor. Another possible factor in explaining recent farm size is the demographic shift: the age distribution of farmers has shifted to the right and older farmers...

Previous research has found that on-farm income variability helps determine off-farm labor supply. However, unobserved heterogeneity of farms or regions may have biased earlier results. In this study, we use an exogenous increase in Federal crop insurance subsidies as a natural experiment to...

Economic theory suggests several possible mechanisms through which direct government farm payments might influence the pattern of structural change in agriculture. This study estimates what effect farm payments have had on farm structure using farm-level panel data from the 1987, 1992, and 1997...

The idea that agricultural subsidies are fully capitalized into farmland values forms the foundation of the argument that subsidies are entitlements and removing them would drastically reduce farmland asset values. Surprisingly little evidence substantiates this claim. Using field-level data and...

Farm income is highly variable due to annual price and yield uncertainties. The federally subsidized crop insurance program is an important tool for managing this risk, and has grown from a relatively modest program to one that encompasses the majority of productive cropland in the country. The...

Over the last twenty five years commodity crop farms have steadily declined in number and grown in average size, and production has shifted to larger operations. During the same period, the share of agricultural payments going to large farms has increased, in large part because payments are tied...

The first part of this paper presents a simple labor supply and production model wherein farmers with diminishing marginal utility of income derive nonpecuniary benefits from farming. We use the model to show how lump-sum or decoupled government payments could have positive and substantial...

Using a unique farm-level panel data set derived from three U.S. Agricultural Censuses, we estimate a Cox proportional hazard model to examine the effect of direct government payments on the survival of farm businesses, paying particular attention to the differential effect of payments across...

This study makes use of farm-level data from the Agricultural Census to evaluate the effects of the 1996 Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act, which intended to "decouple" commodity payments from production decisions. Prior to this Act, agricultural support payments were linked...