Producers’ increased reliance on crop insurance has led to concerns about losses producers could incur that are not covered by crop insurance. In the current farm bill debate, several proposals that would be based on area (county) revenue and are intended to cover a portion of producers’...

Recent increases in farm real estate values in the U.S. have increased farm equity in the form of unrealized capital gains. Exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused different increases in wealth for farmers owning different shares of their farmland, we examine if U.S. grain...

We study how increases in wealth from the appreciation of U.S. farmland influenced farm proprietor decisions to borrow, buy land, and expand. Exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused different increases in wealth for proprietors owning a larger or smaller share of their...

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...

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...

This paper presents preliminary evidence on the effect of crop insurance on fertilizer and chemical inputs in agriculture. Our estimates are based on two sources of identification that emerge from a policy change concerning insurance subsidies that approximately doubled total premiums and the...

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...