PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Coderoni, Silvia
AU  - Esposti, Roberto
AU  - Varacca, Alessandro
TI  - How Differently Do Farms Respond to Agri-environmental Policies? A Probabilistic Machine-Learning Approach
AID  - 10.3368/le.100.2.060622-0043R1
DP  - 2023 Oct 16
TA  - Land Economics
PG  - 060622-0043R1
4099  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/early/2023/10/09/le.100.2.060622-0043R1.short
4100  - http://le.uwpress.org/content/early/2023/10/09/le.100.2.060622-0043R1.full
AB  - This study evaluates to what extent farmers respond heterogeneously to the agri-environmental policies implemented within the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Our identification and estimation strategy combines a theory-driven research design formalizing all possible sources of heterogeneity with a Bayesian additive regression trees algorithm. Results from a 2015-2018 panel of Italian farms show that the responsiveness to these policies may differ substantially across farms and farm groups. This suggests room for improvement in the implementation of these policies. We also argue that the specific features of the CAP call for a careful implementation of these empirical techniques.