講座題目：發展經濟學前沿

主講人：Andrew Foster

講座時間：2017年6月7日〔星期三〕下午14：00----16:00

講座地點：bevictor伟德官网學術會堂604會議室

主講人簡介：

Andrew Foster, 現為布朗大學經濟學教授。Foster教授博士畢業于加州大學伯克利分校，并曾先後在賓夕法尼亞大學、布朗大學任教。Foster教授是當今發展經濟學、人口經濟學及家庭經濟學的頂級專家，在American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies等經濟學頂尖期刊發表多篇論文。Foster教授擔任了多項社會服務的工作，曾任布朗大學經濟系系主任，World Bank Economic Review的主編，現擔任發展經濟學頂級期刊Journal of Development Economics的主編及發展經濟學頂級會議組織BREAD的主席。

講座摘要：

   While globally the most productive farms are large farms, there is persistence evidence of a so-called in most developing countries of an "inverse relationship" between farm size and productivity. In this paper, we develop a model of scale economies in agriculture that incorporates two novel features: a fixed transaction cost associated with hiring inputs inclusive of labor and a complementarity between machine capacity and land size. We test the implications of the model using a six-year panel data set of 20 villages from rural India. An important attribute of this data set is that it differentially samples large farms, allowing an assessment of farms at the high end for rural India. We find a u-shaped relationship between farm size and farm profitability and show that this pattern cannot be explained by differences in wealth, land quality, measurement error or ability selection. However, our model is able to capture key features of the relationship as well as other patterns in the data including a downward relationship between average wages and worker hours and a decrease in sprayer hours but an increase in sprayed output with larger farm areas. We conclude that, despite the inverse relationship, major advances in agricultural productivity will be limited in the absence of an expansion of farm size and increased access to high capacity machines.