Migration and farm technical efficiency: evidence from Kosovo

This article investigates the effect of migration on farm technical efficiency drawing on a large and representative sample of agricultural households in Kosovo. A two-stage estimation procedure is applied: a frontier technique to estimate the effect of migration on farm efficiency, followed by a propensity score based matching approach to robustly estimate the sample average effect on efficiency for different levels of migration intensity. Migration is found to have an efficiency decreasing effect, which is amplified for better educated workers. The observed negative effect of migration on efficiency is evident even at low levels of migration intensity.