Effect of personality traits on smallholders’ land renting behavior: Theory and evidence from the North China Plain

Abstract This study investigates the effects of smallholders’ personality traits on their land rental market decisions. We develop a conceptual framework and show that these internal factors could affect smallholders’ land rental market participation beyond institutional and socio-demographic factors. Our empirical analysis is based on a survey of 2119 rural households collected in the North China Plain. We found that smallholders with a higher level of openness were more active in participating in the farmland rental market. Moreover, internal locus of control played a significant role in explaining smallholders’ land renting behavior. We further show that need for achievement mediated the link between internal locus of control and the smallholder’s intention to rent land, indicating that fostering a higher level of internal locus of control—and subsequently achievement desire—could play a significantly positive role in promoting smallholders’ land-renting behavior. More generally, our results imply that taking rural smallholders’ personality traits into account in designing land rental policies may increase the effectiveness of policies aimed at promoting land rental market participation among smallholders and incubating crop farm scale enlargement in rural China.