Movers and stayers in the farming sector: another look at heterogeneity in structural change

Legrand Dunold Fils Saint-Cyr (1) , Laurent Piet (1)

1 SMART-LERECO - Structures et Marché Agricoles, Ressources et Territoires

The Markov chain model (MCM) has become a popular tool in the agricultural economics literature to study the impact of various drivers on the structural change of farms, including public support. In order to relax the process-homogeneity assumption underlying the MCM, we consider a mixture of two types of agents, the ‘stayers’ who always remain in their initial size category, and the ‘movers’ who follow a first-order Markovian process. An empirical application to a panel of commercial French farms over 2000-2012 shows that the mover-stayer model (MSM) is a better modeling framework to recover the underlying transition probability matrix.

Mots clés: structural change; markov chain model; mover Stayer model; mixture model; EM algorithm

Domaines: Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]

Legrand Dunold Fils Saint-Cyr, Laurent Piet. Movers and stayers in the farming sector: another look at heterogeneity in structural change. SA 2015 « Structures d’exploitation et exercice de l’activité agricole : Continuités, changements ou ruptures? », Société Française d'Economie Rurale (SFER). FRA., Feb 2015, Rennes, France. ⟨hal-01209045⟩