Recent work has suggested that tropical forest and savanna represent alternative stable states, which are subject to drastic switches at tipping points, in response to changes in rainfall patterns and other drivers. Deforestation cost studies have ignored the likelihood and possible economic...

We use metro-level variation in land and structural input prices to test and estimate a housing cost function with differences in local housing productivity. Both OLS and IV estimates imply that stringent regulatory and geographic restrictions substantially increase housing prices relative to...

Considerable prior analysis has gone into the study of zoning restrictions on locational choice and on fiscal burdens. The prior work on zoning - particularly fiscal or exclusionary zoning - has provided both inconclusive theoretical results and quite inconsistent empirical support of the...

Victory in the War for Independence brought a vast amount of land within the grasp of the new American nation -- territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River between the southern shores of the Great Lakes and Spanish Florida. These lands were initially claimed by...

Many communities are concerned about the reuse of potentially contaminated land ("brownfields") and believe that environmental liability is a hindrance to redevelopment. However, with land price adjustments, liability might not impede the reuse of this land. Existing literature has found price...

We develop theory and present a suite of theoretically consistent empirical measures to explore the extent to which market intervention inadvertently alters resource allocation in a sequentialmove principal/agent game. We showcase our approach empirically by exploring the extent to which the...

This paper examines the economics of large scale institutional change by studying the adoption of the land demarcation practices within the British Empire during the 17th through 19th Centuries. The advantages of systematic, coordinated demarcation, such as with the rectangular survey, relative...

Crop production is subject to supply shocks, and both expected and realized outputs as well as output prices are unknown when inputs are chosen. The process by which producers form expectations is difficult to model, especially when working with aggregate data. We present a necessary and...

The federal government has developed a large number of programs to insure various "specialty crops" over the last two decades; a given program is peculiar to a particular county and crop. This development has been particularly notable in California, because of its size and the diversity of crops...