Understanding farmers’ land use behavior under different institutional settings

This project explores the role of farm succession and inheritance, important formal and informal institutions of land transfer, for land fragmentation, landowner fragmentation and absentee landownership. It then investigates the effect of these implications on the economic and environmental performance of farms. In Austria, different traditions of inheritance and succession of farms exist. In most regions, impartial inheritance (“Anerbenrecht”) has been the common practice, while some regions in Burgenland, Lower Austria and eastern Styria have traditionally practiced partible inheritance (“Realteilung”). We utilize two large-scale geospatial datasets: 1) the Integrated Accounting and Control System (IACS), which includes land use information at the plot-level such as crop choice and participation in agri-environmental schemes; and 2) Austrian cadaster data, containing information on legal property items and their owners, including owners’ place of residence. Moreover, we combine farm-level data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) with plot-level data and conduct qualitative interviews with farmers and landowners.