Challenges of the Farmland Market: Essays on the Tension between Financialization and Regulation

Abstract

In the recent decades, the German farmland marked faced enormous price increases. Those price increases caused intensive research. Among others, three streams of thought were especially in focus: farmland price determinants, the activities of nonagricultural investors and farmland market regulation. This thesis aims to contribute to those research streams within four cumulative research studies. The first study addresses the research stream concerning price determinants and revisits the price determinant soil quality within a panel cointegration regression approach. It addresses the research aims (1) to estimate the relative farmland price difference caused by soil quality over time and (2) to determine whether this relative price difference describes a long-run relationship over time. Therefore, aggregated farmland price time series within Germany from 1991 to 2020 have been used. The results of the study suggest that soil quality cause a significant relative farmland price difference over time. Furthermore, the aggregated time series within soil quality intervals follow a significant long-run relationship which indicates that the relative price share determined by soil quality is stable over time. The second contribution within this thesis addresses price determinants as well. Within a replication study of Ritter et al. (2020; Land Use Policy, DOI: j.landusepol.2020.104771), the price determinant parcel size has been analyzed with two research aims: (3) to extend the geographical scope, which allows insights into regional differences in the price structure for farmland and (4) to evaluate the role of assumptions regarding the functional form for the sizeprice relationship. Recent research concerning the effect of parcel sizes on farmland prices showed ambiguous results. Therefore, the study of Ritter et al. ( 2020) had investigated the nonlinear form of the farmland size-price relationship for the German federal state Saxony-Anhalt with a non-parametric and a parametric approach. Within the replication study included in this thesis, the approach of Ritter et al. ( 2020) has been verified for Saxony-Anhalt and extended for the two German federal states Brandenburg and Lower Saxony. The results of the replication confirm the nonlinear form of the farmland size-price relationship. They also show that the functional form of this relationship differs between the three federal states and therefore probably across larger geographical regions in general. Furthermore, the form for grassland suggests different implications. Within the third study, the research stream nonagricultural investors is addressed more in detail. The engagement of nonagricultural investors is of rising V interest during the last decades, however, their motives to buy farmland are barely investigated.To address the question, a discrete choice experiment has been conducted in 2021 with 639 participants across Germany. The research goal of the study is an (5) investigation, whether the four groups of factors key investment information, subjective kn...