Beginning Farmers and Ranchers (BFRs) in the U.S. represent a diverse and important subset of family farms. Understanding their financial needs is of paramount importance for supporting the future of American farmers. The focus of this work is on evaluating to what extent credit constraints affect the BFRs’ production. We use propensity score matching to show that credit constraints are associated with significantly lower production levels. To address the highly heterogeneous nature of BFRs, we complement the matching procedure with Principal Components Analysis and clustering to extract more information from the available Agricultural Resource Management Survey data. The results show losses in the total and per acre production values attributed to being credit-constrained, ranging between 14–77% and 24–72%, depending on the matching method, which has important policy implications.

中文翻译：

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美国的信用约束和开始农民的生产：来自倾向得分匹配与主成分聚类的证据

美国的初级农场主和牧场主 (BFR) 代表了家庭农场的一个多样化且重要的子集。了解他们的财务需求对于支持美国农民的未来至关重要。这项工作的重点是评估信用约束在多大程度上影响 BFR 的生产。我们使用倾向得分匹配来表明信用约束与显着降低的生产水平相关。为了解决 BFR 的高度异质性，我们使用主成分分析和聚类来补充匹配程序，以从可用的农业资源管理调查数据中提取更多信息。结果显示，由于信用受限，总产值和每英亩产值的损失介于 14-77% 和 24-72% 之间，具体取决于匹配方法，