Farm household risk balancing: empirical evidence from Switzerland

Abstract

This paper presents empirical evidence on household risk balancing behavior, i.e. farm households making strategic off-farm decisions in response to changes in expected business risk. Using Swiss FADN data, we estimate a fixed effects seemingly unrelated regression model to analyse how farm households jointly alter their levels of debt, off-farm income and consumption. The evidence suggests that farm households not only make strategic changes in debt levels (original risk balancing), but also strategic off-farm decisions (household risk balancing). Our results demonstrate that part of the behavioral risk response of farm households is ignored when focusing solely on farm-level analyses.