ABSTRACT
The behavioral function discontinuities are implied by most of the explanations of the inverse productivity relationship, based on anthropological differences between "family" and "nonfamily," or systematic divergence in behavior between "small" and "large" farms. In this chapter, the authors investigate several dimensions of the purported relationship between productivity and farm size. They use the Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS–ISA), nationally representative surveys of five sub-Saharan African countries, which provide standardized location details of sampled communities, allowing the data to be linked to any other georeferenced data. The proxies for market access are taken from the geospatial data set of the LSMS–ISA surveys, which include households' average distances to the nearest market and major road. The authors are able to control for many exogenous common and comparative geospatial measures of land quality, infrastructure, and access to markets, climate conditions, soil, and topography.
