Direct Payments, Spatial Competition, and Farm Survival in Norway

We argue that farm survival is influenced by neighboring farmers’ characteristics and, in particular, by the direct payments neighboring farmers receive. The article shows empirically that these interdependencies are crucial for an assessment of the effects of direct payments on farm survival. Using spatially explicit farm‐level data for nearly all Norwegian farms, a spatial probit model is estimated to explain farm survival from 1999 to 2009 controlling for spatial farm interdependence. We show that ignoring spatial interdependencies between farms leads to a substantial overestimation of the effects of direct payments on farm survival. To our knowledge, this article is the first attempt to empirically analyze the importance of neighboring interdependencies for the effects of direct payments on farm survival.