IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/jafrec/v24y2015i1p148-171..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reverse-Share-Tenancy and Agricultural Efficiency: Farm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia

Author

Listed:
  • Hosaena H. Ghebru
  • Stein T. Holden

Abstract

Using a unique tenant–landlord matched dataset from the Tigray region of Ethiopia, we are able to show how the tenants' strategic response to the varying economic and tenure-security status of the landlords helps explain sharecroppers' productivity differentials. The study reveals that sharecroppers' yields are significantly lower on plots leased from landlords who are non-kin and landlords with weaker economic and tenure-security status (such as female) than on plots leased from landlords with the contrasting characteristics. While, on aggregate, the results show no significant efficiency loss on kin-operated sharecropped plots, more decomposed analyses indicate strong evidence of Marshallian inefficiency on kin-operated plots leased from landlords with weaker bargaining power and higher tenure insecurity. This study thus shows how failure to control for the heterogeneity of landowners' characteristics can explain the lack of clarity in the existing empirical literature on the extent of moral hazard problems in sharecropping contracts.

Suggested Citation

  • Hosaena H. Ghebru & Stein T. Holden, 2015. "Reverse-Share-Tenancy and Agricultural Efficiency: Farm-Level Evidence from Ethiopia," Journal of African Economies, Centre for the Study of African Economies, vol. 24(1), pages 148-171.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:24:y:2015:i:1:p:148-171.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jae/eju024
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hailu, Getu & Weersink, Alfons & Minten, Bart J., 2015. "Rural Organizations, Agricultural Technologies and Production Efficiency of Teff in Ethiopia," 2015 Conference, August 9-14, 2015, Milan, Italy 211702, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    2. Brhanu , Desta & Holden , Stein T., 2018. "Variation in Output Shares and Endogenous Matching in Land Rental Contracts," CLTS Working Papers 2/18, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 16 Oct 2019.
    3. Komatsu,Hitomi & Ambel,Alemayehu A. & Koolwal,Gayatri B. & Yonis,Manex Bule, 2021. "Gender and Tax Incidence of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9715, The World Bank.
    4. Qiu, Tongwei & Zhang, Danru & Choy, S.T. Boris & Luo, Biliang, 2021. "The interaction between informal and formal institutions: A case study of private land property rights in rural China," Economic Analysis and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 578-591.
    5. Abay, Kibrom A. & Chamberlin, Jordan & Berhane, Guush, 2021. "Are land rental markets responding to rising population pressures and land scarcity in sub-Saharan Africa?," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C).
    6. Ma, X. & Zhou, Y. & Heerink, N. & Shi, X. & Liu, H., 2018. "Tenure security, social relations and contract choice: Endogenous matching in the Chinese land rental market," 2018 Conference, July 28-August 2, 2018, Vancouver, British Columbia 277478, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    7. Tongwei Qiu & Xianlei Ma & Biliang Luo, 2022. "Are private property rights better? evidence from the marketization of land rentals in rural China," Economic Change and Restructuring, Springer, vol. 55(2), pages 875-902, May.
    8. Haji Athumani Msangi & Hamza Moluh Njoya & Katharina Löhr & Stefan Sieber & Betty Waized & Daniel Wilson Ndyetabula, 2024. "Determinants of land tenure formalization under customary and statutory land tenure systems in Tanzania," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 4(1), pages 1-24, January.
    9. Tang, Liang & Ma, Xianlei & Zhou, Yuepeng & Shi, Xiaoping & Ma, Jia, 2019. "Social relations, public interventions and land rent deviation: Evidence from Jiangsu Province in China," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 406-420.
    10. Komatsu, Hitomi & Ambel, Alemayehu A. & Koolwal, Gayatri & Yonis, Manex Bule, 2022. "Gender norms, landholdership, and rural land use fee and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 121(C).
    11. Ghebru, Hosaena & Khan, Huma & Lambrecht, Isabel, 2016. "Perceived land tenure security and rural transformation: Empirical evidence from Ghana:," IFPRI discussion papers 1545, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    12. Gwendoline Promsopha, 2018. "Risk†Coping, Land Tenure And Land Markets: An Overview Of The Literature," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 176-193, February.
    13. Yuge Wang & Apurbo Sarkar & Min Li & Zehui Chen & Ahmed Khairul Hasan & Quanxing Meng & Md. Shakhawat Hossain & Md. Ashfikur Rahman, 2022. "Evaluating the Impact of Forest Tenure Reform on Farmers’ Investment in Public Welfare Forest Areas: A Case Study of Gansu Province, China," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(5), pages 1-17, May.
    14. Holden, Stein T,, 2017. "Policies for Improved Food Security: - The Roles of Land Tenure Policies and Land Markets," CLTS Working Papers 9/17, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Centre for Land Tenure Studies, revised 21 Oct 2019.
    15. Teshome Beyene Leta & Arega Bazezew Berlie & Mehrete Belay Ferede, 2021. "Effects of the current land tenure on augmenting household farmland access in South East Ethiopia," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 8(1), pages 1-11, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:jafrec:v:24:y:2015:i:1:p:148-171.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/csaoxuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.