Replaced with revised version of paper 09/27/11.

In rapidly suburbanizing areas, minimum lot sizes of ten acres or greater are often used to discourage residential development and to maintain agricultural critical mass. Because of significant development pressure in these places, there is a good chance these lot size regulations will bind....

Many communities in the United States face the decision about whether to protect or restore forests on environmentally sensitive sites. The objective of this research is to identify priority areas for forest landscape restoration in Knox County, Tennessee. A cost-benefit analysis is conducted to...

This study was funded by the the University Transportation Center for Mobility, Texas Transportation Institute

This study takes the standard acreage response model that stems from an expected utility framework, accounting for both price and yield variability, and nests it within a flexible semi-nonparametric (SNP) model consistent with farm-level decision models for computationally tractable results. We...

We explicitly measure corn acreage response to the biofuels boom from 2006 to 2010. Specifically, we use newly available micro-scale planting data over time to test whether corn cultivation intensifies in proportion to the proximity of ethanol processors. We control for the endogeneity of plant...

Tackling the problem of ecosystem services degradation is an important policy challenge. Different types of economic instruments have been employed by conservation agencies to meet this challenge. Notable among them are Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) schemes that pay private landowners to...

This paper examines the extensive and intensive margin changes in land use in the U.S. likely to be induced by biofuel policies and the implications of these policies for GHG emissions over the 2007-2022 period. The policies considered here include the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) by itself as...