Is regulation of agricultural land markets warranted? - A microstructural investigation

最近提出的对农田市场进行更严格监管的建议被认为是合理的，因为人们认为农民有被“高价赶出市场”的风险。这种风险被怀疑是因为非农业力量对土地的新需求而增加的。在第一阶段，我们通过估计投资者、城市化和现有监管本身对价格的影响来分析这些理由。在第二阶段，我们计划保持调查土地市场监管的影响和理由的总体目标，但通过考虑价格以外的其他市场结果、农田价格的其他潜在驱动因素和增加一个新的研究区域，从三个方面拓宽我们的视角。这种扩大是很重要的，因为将价格保持在当地农民能够承受的范围内，仅仅是实现农田监管的最终目标的一种手段：维持一个健康和可持续的当地农业结构。此外，最近农田市场的变化可能是由土地市场效率以外的其他社会问题和政策驱动的，例如可持续性目标。因此，我们希望在第二阶段研究可再生能源政策和城市化对农田价格以及作物多样性等其他结果的影响。对种植可再生能源作物的补贴等政策对农田市场的影响可能是间接的，因为它改变了农民的成本和动机，从而改变了他们在当地的市场力量。因此，我们不仅旨在估计直接的、简化形式的影响，而且还旨在通过建立市场微观结构模型来揭示间接影响。因此，我们也将我们的计量经济学方法扩展到结构方程模型。确定这种影响需要来自政策和驱动因素存在时空变化的地区的丰富数据。因此，我们计划将北莱茵-威斯特伐利亚州加入我们现有的柏林-勃兰登堡研究区域。这两个地区都受到土地市场的一些相同的非农业驱动因素的影响，但服从不同的农业结构和农田价格水平，形成了一个有趣的对比。

Recently proposed stricter regulation of farmland markets has been justified by the perceived risk of farmers being “priced out of the market”. This risk is suspected to have increased because of new demand for land from non-agricultural forces. In Phase I, we analysed such justifications by estimating the price-impacts of investors, urbanisation and of existing regulation itself.In Phase II we plan to maintain our overall objective to investigate the impacts of and the justifications for land market regulation but broaden our perspective in three ways by considering other market outcomes than prices, other potential drivers of farmland prices and adding a new study region. This broadening is important because keeping prices within the reach of local farmers is merely a means to farmland regulation’s ultimate aim: maintaining a healthy and sustainable local farming structure. Moreover, recent changes on farmland markets may be driven by other societal concerns and policies than land market efficiency, such as sustainability goals. We therefore want to study in Phase II which impact renewable energy policies and urbanization have on farmland prices but also on other outcomes such as crop diversity. The impacts of policies like subsidies for growing renewable energy crops on farmland markets may be indirect, by altering the costs and incentives of famers and thus their local market power. We thus do not only aim at estimating direct, reduced-form effects but also at uncovering indirect affects via modelling the market-microstructure. We therefore also expand our econometric methodology to Structural Equation Models. Identifying such effects needs rich data from areas with spatial and temporal variation in policies and drivers. We thus plan to add North Rhine-Westphalia to our existing study region of Berlin-Brandenburg. Both regions are exposed to some of the same non-agricultural drivers of land markets, but obey different farming structures and farmland price levels, creating an interesting contrast.