Family farm succession and specific knowledge in Italy

The succession in family farm is a critical issue: it not only involves the transmission of wealth, but also of specific skills and of specific farm management techniques. It is therefore important to explore the conditions under which a farm household can transmit the farm management within the household itself. In this paper the determinants of the likely farm succession within the family are estimated and the hypothesis put forward by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1985) for LDCs that farm-specific knowledge creates an incentive for children to take on the farm is tested in a developed country, Italy. To do this, probit models are estimated of the determinants for the presence of prospective successors, taking as an indicator the presence of children working on the farm. Explanatory variables include personal characteristics of the operators, including their work status, and farm, location and labour market characteristics. The results suggest that specific knowledge does favour farm succession within the household, along with other variables already considered in the previous literature.