ABSTRACT Are small farms more productive? With this question in mind, this study revisits the farm size–productivity relationship and explores potential explanations using a unique plot-level data from predominantly wheat producers in Ethiopia. Overall, we find that small plots are more productive than large plots. We next test the conventional explanations hypothesised in the literature – labour market imperfection related to costly monitoring of hired workers and omitted variable bias related to soil quality – and find that neither of them essentially explains the inverse relationship. More importantly, we account for agricultural intensification and found no relationship between plot size and productivity. This suggests that the inverse relationship posited in the literature could simply arise from neglecting the impact of agricultural intensification.

中文翻译：

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重新审视农场规模与生产力的关系：来自埃塞俄比亚的新经验证据

摘要：小农场的生产力更高吗？考虑到这个问题，本研究重新审视了农场规模与生产力的关系，并使用来自埃塞俄比亚主要小麦生产者的独特地块级数据探索了潜在的解释。总的来说，我们发现小地块比大地块更有生产力。我们接下来测试文献中假设的传统解释——劳动力市场不完善与对雇佣工人的昂贵监控有关，并忽略了与土壤质量相关的变量偏差——并发现它们都没有本质上解释了反向关系。更重要的是，我们考虑了农业集约化，发现地块大小和生产力之间没有关系。