Seminar with Heidi Leonhardt

Abstract

Historically, two different traditions of succession of agricultural holdings exist: impartible inheritance, where all land of a farm is transferred to a single
successor, and partible inheritance, where (the land belonging to) a holding is
split among several successors. Many authors believe (although rarely test empirically) that partible inheritance fosters land use fragmentation, as land parcels are split between several heirs. However, land can be split without splitting
parcels, family and marriage traditions may counteract fragmentation, and land
consolidation via consolidation projects, land markets, or informal land exchanges decreases fragmentation. In the presented work I test the empirical
relationship between inheritance traditions and land fragmentation as well as
land ownership fragmentation for crop farms in North-Eastern Austria, where
both traditions used to exist. I gathered data from an Austria-wide folk atlas
from the 1960s on the traditional geographical distribution of inheritance traditions, combined it with land use data from the EU’s Integrated Administration
and Control System (IACS) to construct indicators on land use fragmentation
and land ownership, and will add further data on land owners from the Austrian cadastre. I analyse the relationships using simple multivariate regressions,
controlling for biophysical characteristics of land and farm characteristics. Results suggest that indicators of plot dispersion appear to be unrelated to inheritance traditions, and the same is true for measures of plot size dispersion and
farm size. The number of plots and their average size, however, appear to be
higher and lower respectively in areas with partible inheritance, and the share
of owned land is lower, contrary to the share of land informally exchanged between farmers. Therefore, partible inheritance appears to have existing, but
limited effects on land use fragmentation and land ownership.