Melichar (1978): Farm Income and Asset Values, 1950-77

Overview

Emanuel Melichar spent his career as a senior economist in the Division of Research and Statistics at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, specializing in agricultural finance and farmland values; his later work is credited with informing Congressional testimony during the 1980s US farm and bank crisis.[1] Fred Harrison's The Power in the Land cites a 1978 Melichar study — referenced in the book as "The Relationship Between Farm Income and Asset Values, 1950-77" — for a data table (Table 9:I) showing the residual return to US farm production assets as a percentage of the value of production assets, which Harrison reads as corroborating an 18-year cycle in the return to farmland, extending the cycle thesis from urban land into agriculture using official Federal Reserve data.[2]

This page is a stub: the exact original publication venue of Melichar's 1978 study (a Federal Reserve Bulletin article versus a working paper) could not be independently confirmed from public bibliographic databases in this session, though Melichar's identity, Federal Reserve affiliation, and extensive body of related published work on farm income and asset values (including his AJAE article "Capital Gains versus Current Income in the Farming Sector," 1979) are well documented.[1]

See Also

• 18-Year Land Cycle — the cycle thesis this data table is used to corroborate in agriculture
• The Power in the Land (book) — the discovery source for this citation
• Boom-Bust Cycle — the broader macroeconomic pattern the land cycle is argued to drive

Sources

1. Emanuel Melichar, IDEAS/RePEc author profile — ideas.repec.org/f/pme709.html — used to verify Melichar's identity, Federal Reserve Board affiliation, and body of published agricultural-finance research. See also his obituary for career details: Donaldson Funeral Home.
2. Fred Harrison, The Power in the Land (1983), Ch. 9, p. 122, Table 9:I — cites "Melichar, 'The Relationship Between Farm Income and Asset Values, 1950-77' (1978)" as the source for residual-return-to-farm-assets data used to extend the 18-year land cycle thesis to US agriculture. See the wiki's book page.

Note on the primary source: the exact original publication of the 1978 study Harrison cites ("The Relationship Between Farm Income and Asset Values, 1950-77") could not be independently located in this session; database searches surfaced only Melichar's closely related, verifiable published work on the same subject — notably Emanuel Melichar, "Capital Gains versus Current Income in the Farming Sector," American Journal of Agricultural Economics 61(5), 1979, pp. 1085–1092 (DOI: 10.2307/3180381), which analyses the residual return to US farm production assets over the 1950–77 period that Harrison's Table 9:I draws on. Harrison's cited data table should therefore be read as sourced through his secondary citation, corroborated by Melichar's documented 1979 treatment of the same data, until the specific 1978 Federal Reserve document is located directly.