Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: The Theory and Practice of Reverse Share Tenancy

该项目的目的是收集和分析有关马达加斯加农村地区土地租赁合同的实地数据，以检验关于贫困社区土地租赁合同的新理论见解所产生的假设。在马达加斯加和其他低收入国家，地主往往比他们的佃农租客更穷，这种现象在一本关于发展中国家这类现象的纯粹经验性的小型文献中被称为“反向共有租赁权”。尽管已经进行了许多关于佃农制度的研究，但关于反向股份租赁的少数已发表的参考文献纯粹是描述性的，并没有提供一个健全的理论框架来解释为什么会出现这种合同。这项研究项目旨在用现场数据对抗我们最近为反向股份租赁开发的几个理论解释，以确定哪些假设机制最好地解释了马达加斯加反向股份租赁的存在。这笔赠款将资助对来自马达加斯加农村地区五个股份租赁密度较高的省份的400户随机选择的家庭的调查。它将使用标准的整群抽样技术，对涉嫌签订佃农协议的家庭进行过度抽样。对于每个家庭，个人、家庭和地块特定的变量将与投入、房东监督、成本和产出分担、合同选择和条件等数据一起收集。然后，现场数据将被用来估计微观计量经济学模型，这些模型将首先检验从理论模型得出的假设，然后使用基于似然的非嵌套假设检验来区分相互竞争的解释。这项研究将对反向股份租赁产生更清晰的理解，然后可以用来指导经济政策，特别是在马达加斯加这样的国家，那里的佃农制度仍然是被禁止的，土地的产权往往不安全。需要更好地理解这种分成制，以便为旨在增加贫困农村家庭福利的土地政策提供信息。此外，通过以一种适应反向租赁制的方式解释分成制，这项工作将对长期存在的关于土地合同的重要文献做出更广泛的贡献。

The aim of this project is to collect and analyze field data regarding land tenancy contracts in rural Madagascar in order to test hypotheses emerging from new theoretical insights on sharecropping contracts in poor communities. In Madagascar and other low-income countries, landlords party to sharecropping agreements are often poorer than their sharecropper tenants, a phenomenon referred to as "reverse share tenancy" in a small, purely empirical literature on such phenomena in the developing world. Even though many studies have been conducted on sharecropping, the few published references there are on reverse share tenancy are purely of a descriptive nature and do not offer a sound theoretical framework to explain why such contracts emerge at all. This research project aims to confront a few theoretical explanations we have recently developed for reverse share tenancy with field data in order to determine which posited mechanisms best explain the existence of reverse share tenancy in Madagascar.This grant would finance a survey of 400 randomly selected households from five provinces in rural Madagascar that have a high density of share tenancy. It will use standard cluster sampling techniques, with oversampling of households suspected of entering sharecropping agreements. For each household, individual-, household- and plot-specific variables will be collected along with data on inputs, landlord supervision, cost- and output-sharing, contract choice and conditions. The field data will then be used to estimate microeconometric models that would first test the hypotheses derived from the theoretical models and then discriminate between competing explanations using a likelihood-based test for non-nested hypotheses.Broader ImpactsSharecropping is pervasive throughout the world. A much clearer understanding of reverse share tenancy would emerge from this research that could then be used to guide economic policy, especially in countries like Madagascar where sharecropping remains banned and property rights in land are often insecure. A better understanding of this sharecropping is needed to inform land policies intended to increase the welfare of poor rural households. Moreover, by explaining sharecropping in a way that accommodates reverse tenancy, this work will contribute more broadly to the longstanding, important literature on agrarian contracts.