Last edited May 2026.

I am an applied microeconomist working on the productivity, viability, and spatial organization of small and beginning farms in the United States. My methods combine restricted-access producer-level microdata with high-resolution geospatial data, causal inference, and machine learning. I enjoy interdisciplinary collaboration and have worked closely with agronomists, sociologists, and remote-sensing scientists in addition to economists.

Current research agenda

My current work is organized around three overlapping themes.

Beginning-farmer entry, survival, and growth. I use restricted ARMS and Census of Agriculture microdata to identify the regional, market, and policy conditions under which new farm operations are established and persist. A central interest is whether entry by new producers in one area generates spillover entry in adjacent areas, and what that pattern implies for the geographic targeting of beginning-farmer support programs.

Small-farm productivity and efficiency. I estimate frontier and distance-function models on producer-level data to measure how productivity varies across operation size, operator experience, and access to land and capital. The work also examines how observed productivity differences map onto the structural conditions that small operations face.

Spatial economics of land, housing, and rural markets. I work on submarket delineation, property-value modeling, and the appropriate use of distance variables in spatial econometrics. Several papers carry this work from agricultural land into urban housing markets, where related estimation problems arise.

Peer-reviewed publications

“Entry Barriers for Beginning and Young Farmers in the U.S.: An Application of Spatial Analysis” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). European Review of Agricultural Economics. Accepted, forthcoming.

“Economic Opportunities of Bioelectricity from Cotton Gin Waste” (with Michael C. Farmer and Abidemi Adisa). Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics, 57, 14-41. DOI: 10.1017/aae.2024.34 (Paper)

“A Problem with Distance Variables and Alternatives for Their Use” (with Michael Farmer, Kusum Naithani, and Donald Lacombe). Journal of Real Estate Research, 1–23. DOI: 10.1080/08965803.2024.2325244 (Paper)

“Individual, Household, and Community Resilience and Coping Strategies to Conflict in Uganda and Malawi” (with James Muriuki and Darren Hudson). Agrekon, 63 (1-2). DOI: 10.1080/03031853.2024.2368128

“Spillover Effect of Violent Conflicts on Food Insecurity in Sub-Saharan Africa” (with James Muriuki, Darren Hudson, Donald Lacombe, and Ray March). Food Policy, 115. DOI: 10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102417

“The Impact of Conflict on Food Security: Evidence from Household Data in Ethiopia and Malawi” (with James Muriuki and Darren Hudson). Agriculture & Food Security, 12, 41. DOI: 10.1186/s40066-023-00447-z

Papers under review

“Beginning Farmers and Farm Productivity in the U.S.: Evidence from the 2022 Census of Agriculture” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. Revise and resubmit.

“Are Beginning Farmers Less Efficient? A Nationwide Assessment Using the U.S. Census of Agriculture Microdata” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. Revise and resubmit.

“Spatial Hierarchies and Latent Preferences: Rethinking Submarket Boundaries in Urban Housing” (with Abidemi Adisa and Michael C. Farmer). Regional Studies, Regional Science. Revise and resubmit.

“Impact of Precision Agriculture on Crop Productivity” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Precision Agriculture. Under review.

“Participation of Women in Farming and Spatial Spillovers Over the Life Cycle: Evidence from the U.S. Census of Agriculture” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Applied Economics Letters. Under review.

“Efficiency in Structurally Disadvantaged Farms: Evidence from Women and Beginning Farmers in the Southeast” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics. Under review.

“Women-Managed Farms and Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from the U.S. Census of Agriculture” (with Valentina Hartarska and Denis Nadolnyak). Food Policy. Under review.

“Property Taxation Regressivity in Atlanta: The Difficulty in Reversing a Legacy of Assessment Gap” (with Michael C. Farmer). Journal of Economic Geography. Under review.

Past research

My Ph.D. work, supervised by Michael C. Farmer, comprised three studies. The first developed an integrated econometric and simulation framework to examine how research-funding strategy affects academic collaboration networks and publication output. The second improved the economic modeling of bioelectricity from cotton-gin waste, combining a 12-year hourly electricity price series with Bayesian simulation and operations research to allocate variable gin trash volumes across a 9-month ginning season (paper). The third examined the persistence of a racial property-tax gap in Atlanta using high-resolution demographic and sales data, reversing a prior finding based on coarser data (paper). Each of these has produced a paper that now appears above as either published or under review.

Pre-Ph.D. publications

Prior to my Ph.D., I worked in policy research on international development economics, with multilateral organizations and international agencies including the United Nations, the Department for International Development (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), the British Academy, and the Overseas Development Institute. Selected works:

Bhattacharya, D., Rahman, M.R., and Fuad, S.M. (2019). How Coherent Are Trade and Investment Policies of the Southern Finance Providers? A Case Study on Indo-Bangla Lines of Credit. New York: United Nations Development Program. External link

Nixon, H., Menocal, A.R., Bhattacharya, D., Fuad, S.M., Hassan, I., et al. (2018). Local Governance, Decentralization and Corruption in Bangladesh and Nigeria. London: Overseas Development Institute. External link