SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS DECEMBER, 1983 A LOGIT MODEL OF FARMERS ' DECISIONS ABOUT CREDIT

Most of the research in agricultural credit in the tion about personal characteristics of the farm operator United States is related to large-scale commercial and economic aspects of the farm-firm household. farming. A number of such studies have tried to esti- The plan of the paper is as follows. Data used for mate the demand for credit (Hesser and Schuh) and/or analysis is described in the next section. The estimated supply of credit (Melichar). Other major areas of re- model is presented in section three. Empirical results search in agricultural credit have been (a) the function- are discussed in section four, while the last section ing of rural financial markets, (b) the effects of national contains a brief summary and concluding remarks. monetary and credit policies on investment and pro-duction in agriculture, (c) capital formation in agricul-ture as affected by national economic policy, and (d) DATA the sources-and-uses-of-funds approach in the analysis of agricultural financing. A brief review of studies re- The data used in this study were collected as part of lated to these four areas is given in Brake. However, a larger farm management study carried out in western the subject of small-farm credit in the United States has Tennessee. Since the objective of the study was to fo-been little explored. cus on the limited resource farms, only those farm