Size, Growth, and Survival in the Upper Austrian Farm Sector

This paper investigates the evolution of the size distribution of more than 40,000 farms in the Upper Austrian farm sector over the period 1980–90. Using Gibrat's Law as our point of departure, we find that smaller farms grow much faster towards some minimum efficient scale of production than farms at or above this threshold size. We furthermore find evidence for the existence of two separate "centres of attraction" of farm size supporting the notion of a "disappearing middle" and the emergence of a bimodal structure of farm sizes. Correcting for size-related attrition bias had very little effect on our results.