Rural Electric Cooperatives and Agricultural Persistence: Evidence from a 122-Year County Panel

J. Wesley Burnett and Timothy Fitzgerald

No 404774, 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Between 1930 and 2022, the United States lost nearly three-quarters of its farms. We examine whether electric cooperatives created under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 slowed this decline. Using a 122-year county panel and variation in cooperative service territories, we estimate the long-run effects of cooperative-led electrification on rural economic outcomes. Our augmented event-study design, which includes state-by-year fixed effects and baseline controls interacted with year, shows that cooperative counties retained about 15% more farms by 2022. The effect is negligible through midcentury but grows steadily after 1950. It is absent in raw cross-county comparisons and appears only when conditioning on within-state variation and pre-treatment differences, reflecting where cooperatives initially formed rather than federal targeting. We find no detectable effects on population, manufacturing, or retail, suggesting an agricultural stabilization channel: electrification helped sustain farms that might otherwise have exited. This contrasts with broad growth effects documented in developing-country electrification studies.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 1
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea26:404774

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.404774

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