دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی استرس مالی و ورشکستگی مزرعه در کشاورزی آمریکا - امرالد 2018

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate farm financial stress within the USA over the past 20 years and the agricultural and economic factors which have impacted farm businesses. The effect of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA) on farm financial stress is further evaluated. In particular, Chapter 12 bankruptcies – which can only be filed by farmers – were only a temporary measure until BAPCPA made Chapter 12 a permanent fixture in bankruptcy law. Design/methodology/approach – Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings from 1997 until 2016 are used as a proxy for farm financial stress. Panel fixed effects models are used to determine relevant factors affecting financial stress for farmers from agricultural and macroeconomic perspectives. Further, models incorporating pre- and post-BAPCPA regimes are utilized. Findings – The results show that macroeconomic factors (interest and unemployment rates) are strong predictors of farm bankruptcies for farms while agricultural land values are the only consistent strong predictor among the agricultural factors. When evaluating the post-BAPCPA regime, only agricultural land values continue to be a significant predictor of farm bankruptcies. The findings also indicate a dynamic relationship with agricultural land values, where current year values are negatively related but previous year land values are positively related to bankruptcies. Originality/value – The authors provide an analysis of the post-BAPCPA regime on farm bankruptcies that has not been evaluated within the literature yet. Further, the findings illuminate discussion on a potentially dynamic relationship with financial stress and agricultural land values.

Conclusion

This paper examines the factors which affect the financial stress of a farm as well as addressing a new question: how does BAPCPA affect farm’s financial stress? Using Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings from 1997 to 2016, we find that it is largely macroeconomic factors (interest rates and unemployment rate) which affect the financial position of farms although land values appear to also affect farm bankruptcy rates among the agricultural factors. From a policy perspective, our findings show that policy makers which aim to improve agricultural indicators (debt-to-asset ratio, working capital to expense ratio, government payments, etc.) as a way to alleviate financial stress should not expect to see a corresponding drop in farm bankruptcies. However, our results are only at the state and district level and do not extend to the farm level, whereby there may be specific farms which may have financial stress lessened due to a change in one of the agricultural indicators that we could not find evidence for an association with bankruptcy filing rates.

Our results also indicate that agricultural land values are highly related to bankruptcy filing rates and that this relationship is dynamic. Our models only use a current and lagged value, but it may be the case that there is a more complex relationship with the two than we posit. Further research is merited in evaluating how the land values, which make up over 80 percent of a farm’s equity, can affect a farm’s likelihood of filing for bankruptcy. It appears the relationship is dynamic in that a rise and fall of land values in consecutive periods indicates increased bankruptcies due to the positive and negative coefficients, respectively.