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Over the past four decades, real values of farm real estate and the share of assets on farmers’ balance sheets attributed to farm real estate have increased. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that explain the concentration of the US agricultural balance sheet around a particular asset, farm real estate, and the extent to which the degree of asset concentration varies across United States Department of Agriculture production regions.

State-level data from 48 states and entropy-based inequality measures are used to examine changes in asset distributions (real estate vs non-real estate assets) both within and between regions over time.

The agricultural balance sheet is found to concentrate into real estate in the USA over the period 1960-2003 with the rate of concentration varying across production regions. In some regions, the concentration is mainly due to changes in real estate prices, while in other regions concentration is also driven by changes in real estate holdings or changes in total factor productivity.

This study formally estimates the degree to which the concentration of balance sheet items can be explained by the observed changes in farm real estate prices relative to observed changes in agricultural factor productivity or changes in farm real estate holdings. The computed regional differences in asset concentration and its main drivers have implications for changes in equity and solvency positions of farmers as well as agricultural lenders’ risk exposure.

A major policy issue facing leaders in the developing world is whether international migration, through remittances, contributes to the development process in migrant-sending communities or impedes the efficient allocation of labor and human capital at the origin countries. This study examines the impact of remittance inflows on out-farm migration of farm labor toward the nonfarm sector. Specifically, this study shows how international migrant remittances may alter the predictions of out-farm migration models by Harris–Todaro.

The authors use unbalanced panel time-series data on 77 developing countries between 1991 and 2010 within a dynamic panel time-series framework to estimate the impact of remittances on the out-farm migration rate.

The authors find two competing effects of remittances on out-farm migration of labor in developing countries. First, remittances decelerate the out-farm migration rates by supplementing farm income and consumption expenditures. Second, remittances provide a source of investment in nonfarm activities that increase the rate of migration out of agriculture over time. Combining these effects, on average, our elasticity estimates indicate that a 10% increase in remittances reduces the migration out of agriculture, on average, by 0.5% in developing countries over time.

The authors findings align with the “developmentalist” or “optimistic” views of international migration. International migration, through remittances, help make the inevitable transition out of the farm sector smoother for developing countries.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to extend the empirical literature on macro-level determinants of out-farm migration within the Harris–Todaro framework to explicitly account for the impacts of remittances inflows into developing countries that the new economics of labor migration (NELM) theory hypothesizes.

We analyze the food security implications of off-farm labor reallocation decisions of rural farm households in transitional Albania. We accomplish this by examining local and nonlocal off-farm incomes for at-home food consumption expenditures.

An instrumental variable approach is employed to correct for endogeneity and censorship biases of off-farm income variables in a two-stage estimation of the food consumption expenditures.

We find that local off-farm income exerts a positive and significant effect on per capita food consumption expenditures of farm households, while private remittances from nonlocal off-farm income has the opposite effect on food consumption expenditures. In terms of regional heterogeneity, we discover that the mountain region spends significantly less on annual per capita food consumption compared to the central region. This confirms anecdotal evidence that food and nutrition insecurity in rural Albania is predominant in the mountain region.

Our findings suggest the need for policy makers to promote a development agenda that enables farm households to exploit the synergies among the various income-generating activities in the rural economy. This spectrum of income-generating activities forms complex livelihood strategies adopted by rural farm households to improve and maintain their food security.

We distinguish between local and nonlocal sources of off-farm income. Knowing which off-farm income source(s) has the largest impact on household welfare through improved food security status should be of interest to policy makers.