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I conduct a disaggregated empirical analysis of the relationship between the reduction in malaria transmission and agricultural development in the United States. Exploiting exogenous geographic variations in malaria‐suitable weather conditions and using historical county data together with a robust quasi‐experimental approach, I show that the farm value per acre of arable land of more endemic counties increased by around eight percentage points after the eradication of the disease relative to less endemic counties. Using historical data on cropland distribution within the United States, I also find that arable land increased in high malaria‐risk areas. Finally, I shed light on the increased productivity of farmers as a potential channel. Robustness checks from geographic variations in malaria prevalence within neighboring counties and placebo treatments reinforce the positive effect of eradicating malaria on agricultural development in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Farm transfer is increasingly seen as fundamental to the development of agriculture. One of the major challenges is to assess farm value in the context of an opaque market for farms. We contribute to the scarce literature on farm valuation by empirically applying three valuation methods to the Farm Accountancy Data Network database for France in 2017 and 2018 and for five types of farming. The three methods—the fundamental method, the patrimonial method, and the financial method—are well known for the valuation of companies, but have yet to be implemented widely for farms in the empirical literature. The results show that wine‐growing farms have the highest values on average. Pig and beef farms have high average patrimonial values, reflecting their high capital intensity, but beef farms have the lowest average values calculated with methods based on cash flows, revealing unfavorable market conditions for these farms. The results further reveal that total farm output drives the value upward, but that high farm labor, indebtedness, and age contribute to reducing value. Our findings also highlight that, in practice, the differences in values across methods may be substantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article estimates the effect of diversification on farm values, where farms are valued relative to the median specialized farm having the same enterprise. Using data from the Agricultural Resource Management Study, the estimated diversification discount in agriculture is similar to the discount found for corporate firms. The results show that diversified crop/livestock farms had a diversification discount of 5.8% in comparison with specialized crop or livestock farms from 1999 to 2001. Commodity diversified farms had a diversification discount of 9.4% in comparison with commodity specialized farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]