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Abstract
Using a sample of French crop farms during the 1999-2006 period, we test whether less
technically efficient farmers are more likely to engage in organic farming in order to benefit
from conversion subsidies. Despite some limitations in our data, we find no evidence of such
selection effect. On the contrary, our estimation results indicate that more technically efficient
farmers are more likely to convert to organic farming. This finding is found to be robust to the
method of calculation of efficiency scores, either parametric or non-parametric. This study
also confirms that farm’s characteristics (education, farm size and legal status) and farmers’
practices under conventional farming do impact the probability of conversion to OF.