CACTEE

Abstract

Farm consolidation has changed the physiognomy of agricultural landscapes in high-income countries in the 20th century. Consolidation was initially promoted as a way to unlock farm productivity, but its agronomic and economic soundness have since been questioned, and concerns over its environmental implications have surfaced. Nevertheless to this day there is no reliable quantification of the causal effect of farm consolidation on their agricultural, economic, or environmental performance; one key reason for that is the presence of confounding factors and reverse causality channels which preclude the identification of causal effects. This project precisely aims at undertaking this estimation in a causal inference framework, using France as a case-study. We will leverage an instrumental variables approach to circumvent the usual sources of bias, whose the logic is the following: being over 60 is a good predictor of head of operations’ retirement, and subsequent sale of the farm, and ultimately of farmland consolidation. This is the source of exogeneous variation we will employ to measure the effects of consolidation on agronomic (input use, yields), economic (profits, total factor productivity), and environmental (pesticide use, downstream water quality, avian biodiversity) performance. The diversity of farms and agricultural landscapes in France, as well as the spatial variability of the instrumental variable (farmer’s age) make for an ideal setting, and together ensure the viability of the project and its potential for external validity.

Contact in TSE: Anouch Missirian

Project Dates: 01/10/2024 - 30/09/2027