Seminario CEDE - Nicolás de Roux

The size of farms is an important determinant of agricultural productivity. This paper studies how rural land markets respond to weather shocks and how the farm size distribution changes as a consequence. Using two unique administrative data sets with transaction-level information on land sales in the country of Colombia and a land registry covering most of the country, we estimate the impact of extreme temperature events on the frequency of land sales and on the farm-size distribution of small geographical units. We find that local land markets that experienced more frequent shocks have more land sales, more owners, and more and smaller farms.