Risk and De-collectivization in the Czech Republic

The replacement of wage-labour farms by family farms in Central and Eastern Europe during the transformation has been more limited than was initially expected. In this paper a formal framework is developed in order to analyse the behaviour of family farms and socialist-style farms in the presence of risk, given the typical post-socialist environment. Management incentives, ownership structure, lump-sum transfers and consumption choices are shown to have the potential to limit the size of family farms relative to socialist-style farms. The hypotheses are tested with survey data collected by the author in the Czech Republic.