Why Farmland Contract Adoption Varies: Policy, Transactions, and Institutional Access in China

Uniform legal requirements for written farmland-rental contracts do not necessarily produce uniform contracting practices. This study examines how policy-tool design, transaction heterogeneity, and institutional access jointly structure written-contract adoption in rural China. We coded 101 provincial policy documents across 27 provincial-level regions, of which 69 documents contributed to the baseline policy stock as of 31 December 2021, and analyzed 7237 farmland-transfer transactions using fixed-effects models, common-support restrictions, overlap weighting, and entropy balancing. General contract norms were more extensively operationalized than differentiated risk-governance tools (mean scores, 1.673 vs. 1.309), a pattern observed in 19 of 27 regions. Written-contract adoption was higher among professional agricultural operators and in larger transactions, whereas the positive unadjusted difference for non-local operators reversed after covariate adjustment. Transactions reporting a village-level organization or intermediary channel had an adjusted adoption rate 16.05 percentage points higher than other transactions; estimates remained positive under more local fixed effects and weighting, although magnitude and precision varied across channel configurations and target populations. These findings indicate that contractual formalization is associated with both transaction-specific demand for safeguards and practical access to formal institutions. Effective governance should therefore combine accessible general contracting procedures with tiered risk safeguards and organizational services, while avoiding causal claims from the observational estimates.