Survival and Growth of Family Farms in a Transition Country – The Hungarian Case

The paper investigates the validity of Gibrat’s Law in Hungarian agriculture. We use FADN data between 2001 and 2007 and employ quantile regression techniques to test the validity of Gibrat’s Law across quantiles. The Law is strongly rejected for all quantiles, providing strong evidence that smaller farms tend to grow faster than larger ones. We provide a number of socio-economic factors that can explain farm growth. Of these we found that total subsidies received by farm and far operator’s age are the most significant factors