Property rights and farm efficiency: evidence from Ukraine

This paper studies the effect of property rights regime on farm efficiency, using a high-quality representative sample from Ukraine??s agricultural sector. At the farm level, I find that a fully delineated and secure system of property rights leads to large positive gains in efficiency. In Ukraine, farms with a well-defined and enforced governance system have 20% higher level of productive efficiency and 9% higher level of technical efficiency as compared to farms with a contractual incompleteness. The ownership arrangement has profound effect on agricultural production in Ukraine.