Challenges of the Farmland Market: Essays on the Tension between Financialization and Regulation
Dissertation
Datum der mündl. Prüfung:2023-10-24
Erschienen:2024-01-18
Betreuer:Prof. Dr. Oliver Mußhoff
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Oliver Mußhoff
Gutachter:Prof. Ph.D. Xiaohua Yu
Gutachter:Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brümmer
Dateien
Name:Dissertation Luise Meissner Kurzversion eDis...pdf
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Format:PDF
Zusammenfassung
Englisch
In the recent decades, the German farmland marked faced enormous price increases. Those price increases caused intensive research. Among others, three streams of thought were especially in focus: farmland price determinants, the activities of nonagricultural investors and farmland market regulation. This thesis aims to contribute to those research streams within four cumulative research studies. The first study addresses the research stream concerning price determinants and revisits the price determinant soil quality within a panel cointegration regression approach. It addresses the research aims (1) to estimate the relative farmland price difference caused by soil quality over time and (2) to determine whether this relative price difference describes a long-run relationship over time. Therefore, aggregated farmland price time series within Germany from 1991 to 2020 have been used. The results of the study suggest that soil quality cause a significant relative farmland price difference over time. Furthermore, the aggregated time series within soil quality intervals follow a significant long-run relationship which indicates that the relative price share determined by soil quality is stable over time. The second contribution within this thesis addresses price determinants as well. Within a replication study of Ritter et al. (2020; Land Use Policy, DOI: j.landusepol.2020.104771), the price determinant parcel size has been analyzed with two research aims: (3) to extend the geographical scope, which allows insights into regional differences in the price structure for farmland and (4) to evaluate the role of assumptions regarding the functional form for the size price relationship. Recent research concerning the effect of parcel sizes on farmland prices showed ambiguous results. Therefore, the study of Ritter et al. (2020) had investigated the nonlinear form of the farmland size-price relationship for the German federal state Saxony Anhalt with a non-parametric and a parametric approach. Within the replication study included in this thesis, the approach of Ritter et al. (2020) has been verified for Saxony-Anhalt and extended for the two German federal states Brandenburg and Lower Saxony. The results of the replication confirm the nonlinear form of the farmland size-price relationship. They also show that the functional form of this relationship differs between the three federal states and therefore probably across larger geographical regions in general. Furthermore, the form for grassland suggests different implications. Within the third study, the research stream nonagricultural investors is addressed more in detail. The engagement of nonagricultural investors is of rising V interest during the last decades, however, their motives to buy farmland are barely investigated. To address the question, a discrete choice experiment has been conducted in 2021 with 639 participants across Germany. The research goal of the study is an (5) investigation, whether the four groups of factors key investment information, subjective knowledge of finance, the attitude towards money and sociodemographic characteristics are potential predictors for choosing farmland as an investment. A mixed-logit approach revealed, that variables from all groups of factors had a significant effect on the decision to invest in farmland. The fourth study included in this paper contributes to the research stream “farmland market regulation”. Due to the specific attributes of farmland, the design and evaluation of farmland market regulation is challenging. A further issue is the age of several laws, which makes a comparison of the situation before with the actual situation complicated. Therefore, the fourth study addresses the research aim (6) to present an analytical framework, which allows for a holistic and structured evaluation of farmland market regulation instruments. The German farmland transaction law has been used an example to build the analytical framework out of four components: a careful evaluation of the process behind the regulation instrument, an identification of the concerned parties, a listing of their respective arguments concerning the law and weightings of those arguments. As a result, the analytical framework presents concerned parties, their arguments and exemplary weightings of those arguments in a clear form. The cumulative thesis gives valuable insights about recent price developments of the farmland market. Furthermore, it addresses research streams which had been followed up continuously over the recent decades with novel datasets and innovative methodical approaches.
Keywords: farmland market; econometric analysis; agricultural economics; discrete choice modelling; panel regression