Impacts of work attitude of outsourcing services on food losses: evidence from rice harvest in China

Abstract

This study uses survey data from 651 farmers in China to study the impacts of moral hazard on rice harvest losses and we further study the differences of the impacts across farm scales. The results show that large-scale farms have lower harvest losses and the service providers have more serious attitude when harvesting. After addressing the endogeneity of moral hazard using instrumental variable approach, moral hazard increases harvest losses. However, this impact diminishes as farm size increases. These findings demonstrate the need to reduce moral hazard by increasing farm size, introducing intermediaries, and written contracts, etc.