讲座题目：发展经济学前沿

主讲人：Andrew Foster

讲座时间：2017年6月7日〔星期三〕下午14：00----16:00

讲座地点：中央财经大学学术会堂604会议室

主讲人简介：

Andrew Foster, 现为布朗大学经济学教授。Foster教授博士毕业于加州大学伯克利分校，并曾先后在宾夕法尼亚大学、布朗大学任教。Foster教授是当今发展经济学、人口经济学及家庭经济学的顶级专家，在American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies等经济学顶尖期刊发表多篇论文。Foster教授担任了多项社会服务的工作，曾任布朗大学经济系系主任，World Bank Economic Review的主编，现担任发展经济学顶级期刊Journal of Development Economics的主编及发展经济学顶级会议组织BREAD的主席。

讲座摘要：

   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.