Are There Too Many Farms in the World? Labor Market Transaction Costs, Machine Capacities, and Optimal Farm Size
研究发现劳动力市场交易成本解释了低收入国家小农场效率高于稍大农场的原因，而机器容量随规模扩大导致生产率上尾分布。基于印度数据，若所有农场达到土地回报最大化规模，农场数量将减少82%，农场工人收入提高68%。
We show that labor market transaction costs explain why the smallest farms are more efficient than slightly larger farms in most low-income countries and that increases in machine capacity with operational scale result in the globally observed rising upper tail of productivity. We find evidence consistent with these mechanisms using Indian data, and we show that if all Indian farms were at the minimum scale required to maximize the return on land, the number of farms would be reduced by 82% and income per farm worker would rise by 68%.