We examine how the system of “federalism, Chinese style” functions in the context of land allocation. China’s land laws give provision of land a central role in local officials’ growth promotion strategies. Requisitions of farmland by local authorities have engendered significant rural...

Selected Poster prepared for presentation at the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s 2013 AAEA & CAES Joint Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, August 4-6, 2013. Copyright 2013 by Wendong Zhang and Cynthia J. Nickerson. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this...

We study how increases in wealth from the appreciation of U.S. farmland influenced farm proprietor decisions to borrow, buy land, and expand. Exploiting periods of high and low appreciation that caused different increases in wealth for proprietors owning a larger or smaller share of their...

The attractiveness of agricultural land available in developing countries has markedly increased in the last few years. Driven by rising and highly volatile prices for agricul- tural commodities, large land acquisitions have been undertaken by foreign investors. We formalize the discussion...

We conduct models and tests to ascertain whether there are speculative bubbles and which factors contribute to the bubbles if there exits one. In the model, we use the option value to represent the investment value of farm real estate and compare the option value, calculated from dynamic...

This paper studies the divergence in the planning and equilibrium solutions for a multicell aquifer with heterogeneity in cell depths. A spatial model is developed that explicitly accounts for the lateral movement of water between cells. The optimal planning problem maximizes the discounted...

This study seeks assess how the uncertainties associated with the un- derlying biophysical processes in uence the optimal prole of land use over the next century, in light of potential irreversibility in these deci- sions. Our analysis is based on a dynamic stochastic model of global land use,...