Abstract
Existing literature about the impact of farmland titling on farmland transfer takes no account of farmland plot characteristics, which makes them unable to effectively identify the causal relationship between farmland titling and farmland transfer. After the theoretical analysis, based on land plot level micro-survey data, we adopt the instrumental variable (IV) and conditional mixed process (CMP) methods to ease the endogeneity problem in the model and conduct a quantitative analysis. The results show that the land titling program has significant and positive effects on the transfer-out of farmland. Through a heterogeneity test, we observe a more pronounced promotional effect in regions with a higher economic development level and in farmland transfer deals with government facilitation. Moreover, the further application of a mediating effect model shows that the land titling program increases the net income from farmland transfer-out through increasing the value of farmland and reducing the transaction costs, thus promoting the transferring out of farmland. The findings contribute to providing empirical evidence for how the government may facilitate and support the attaining of more efficient scale operations of farmland.
Highlights
Academic Editor: Hossein AzadiSince the 1980s, the farmland property right system has comprised village collective ownership, with parts of land property rights belonging to farmers, including the rights to transfer and contractual management [1,2]
We introduced the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) to further test the causal relationship between the land titling program (LTP) and farmland transfer-out
It can be found that the LTP has a positive impact on both the intention and behavior of farmland transfer-out at the significant level of 1%, which indicates that the model setting bias of the benchmark regression model does not exist, and the results show a good robustness
Summary
Since the 1980s, the farmland property right system has comprised village collective ownership, with parts of land property rights belonging to farmers, including the rights to transfer and contractual management [1,2]. When measuring the proportion of land-certified farmers in a village that belongs to a sampled township some literature takes the proportion of land-certified farmers in the other n-1 villages (except the villages in which the land-certified farmers proportion is being measured for the regression model) of the sampled township where the farmers are located as an instrumental variable and applies 2SLS to alleviate the endogeneity problem of omitting variables; it should be highlighted that this instrumental variable is not exogenous to the farmland plot characteristics, so the estimated results are still questionable To overcome this shortcoming, we use a unique dataset that contains farmland plot information to conduct the empirical analysis in this paper.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
