Estimating the Investment Behavior of Farm Firms Using the Concept of Rational Distributed Lag Functions

Abstract

This study grew out of the need for a more realistic notion concerning the investment behavior of the individual farm firm. Once a stable investment behavior function is identified, it can be incorporated into dynamic growth models to describe and predict farm firm growth. Considerable effort has been devoted to estimating the appropriate investment behavior function for industrial corporations; however, a search of the literature revealed no estimates of such a function for individual farm firms.The purpose of this study was to estimate the investment behavior function for individual farm firms using the concept of rational distributed lag functions developed by Jorgenson to approximate the time structure of the investment process. To do this, a class of rational distributed lag functions was imposed on a multiple regression equation to obtain the lag distribution that best describes the time path of the investment response to changes in desired capital.