NBER Working Papers by Barry Goodwin

The U.S. has a long history of providing generous support for the agricultural sector. A recent omnibus package of farm legislation, the 2008 Farm Bill (P.L. 110-246) will provide in excess of $284 billion in financial support to U.S. agriculture over the 2008-2012 period. Commodity program payments account for $43.3 billion of this total. Our paper is concerned with the distribution of these benefits. Farm subsidies make agricultural production more profitable by increasing and stabilizing farm prices and incomes. If these benefits are expected to persist, farm land values should capture the subsidy benefits. We use a large sample of individual farm land values to investigate the extent of this capitalization of benefits. Our results confirm that subsidies have a very significant im...