Age and Farmer Productivity

Farmer Efficiency and Technology Use with Age

Common belief and some empirical evidence indicates that productivity of a farmer may increase with age, reach some maximum level, and then decrease with further age (Tauer 1984; Tauer 1995). If productivity exhibits a life-cycle pattern, then productivity of agriculture may decrease as the U.S. farm population continues to age. Lifecycle changes are also critical in planning for succession of ...

The Effects of Education on Farmer Productivity in Rural Ethiopia

The Ethiopian education system is characterised by extremely low participation rates, particularly in rural areas. This paper challenges the hypothesis that demand for schooling in rural Ethiopia is constrained by the traditional nature of farm technology and lack of visible benefits of schooling in terms of farmer productivity. The effects of schooling upon farmer productivity and efficiency a...

Age and Productivity – Sector Differences?

Age, Wage and Productivity: Firm-Level Evidence

In this paper, we estimate the profile of productivity by age through the estimation of production functions. ‘Productivity’ is defined as the average contribution of age groups to the productivity of firms. Our data are a matched employer-employee dataset covering about 70,000 firms in the late 1990’s in France. We find that productivity increases with age until age 40 and then remains stable ...

Can Unobserved Heterogeneity in Farmer Ability Explain the Inverse Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity?∗

The well-known inverse relationship between farm size and productivity is usually explained in terms of diminishing returns with respect to land and other inputs coupled with various types of market frictions that prevent the efficient allocation of land across farms. We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns one can provide an alternative explanation for this phenomenon using end...