Rationing and Adjustment in the Market for Tenancies: The Behavior of Landowning Households in Thanjavur District

Abstract

A large proportion of peasants cultivate only their own land, even when there are active markets for tenancies as well as labor. However, rationing of tenancies can occur under moral hazard or adverse selection. A model that includes as possible outcomes both rationing and full adjustment through trading is analyzed and estimated using data from South India. On this basis, households can be characterized as rationed or adjusted, and confidence intervals for these assignments can be calculated. While some households achieved full adjustment, a majority were rationed in the tenancy market, many of them completely.

Determinants of agricultural land rental market transactions in Bangladesh

“…One of the explanations of non-participation in the land rental market is the transaction cost (Teklu and Lemi, 2004;Tikabo and Holden, 2004) and that transaction cost would drive a wedge between the costs and benefits of tenancy as a landlord and/or as a tenant (Bell and Sussangkarn, 1988). The degree of nonparticipation in the land rental market is an indication of the fixed transaction costs in the market, since it is highly unlikely that all these non-participating households have optimal levels of all factors (both land and non-land factors).…”

Tenure Insecurity, Gender, Low-cost Land Certification and Land Rental Market Participation in Ethiopia

“…Early studies of transaction costs and adjustment in the land rental market include Bliss and Stern (1982), Bell and Sussangkarn (1988) and Skoufias (1995) who developed static models for the analysis of land rental market participation in the presence of transaction costs. These early studies relied on cross-sectional data and could not control for unobserved household heterogeneity.…”

“…About 50 per cent of the households in our baseline survey in 1998 feared they would lose land in redistributions they expected would occur in the future. Bliss and Stern (1982), Bell and Sussangkarn (1988) and Skoufias (1995) have made important contributions to the analysis of allocative efficiency of land rental markets. provide new evidence on the emergence of land rental markets in Africa.…”

Information and the operation of markets: tests based on a general equilibrium model of land leasing in India

“…A number of other papers have considered the functioning of input rental markets as a determinant of leasing behavior -for example, Bell and Sussangkarm (1988), Bliss and Stem (1982), and Skoufias (1991). The methodology used here extends previous work in several directions.…”