For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense...

Food-for-work (FFW) programs are commonly used both for short-term relief and long-term development purposes. In this paper we assess the potential of FFW programs to reduce poverty and promote sustainable land use in the longer run. There is a danger that such programs distort labor allocation...

Recent studies that compare the efficiency and distributional impacts of alternative instruments to curb sprawl typically ignore what to do with the revenues from anti-sprawl policies, such as development taxes. This paper extends first-best analysis of development taxes aimed at preserving land...

This paper analyzes the dynamic effects of the acreage restrictions and land diversion requirements that are characteristic of the farm subsidy programs in the United States. The subsidy payments a farmer receives are based upon historical base acreage, and it 1s sometimes optimal for a farmer...

Soil specific, chance constrained, dynamic models of agricultural production and nitrate leaching are developed to assess the impacts of nitrogen fertilizer taxes, quantity restrictions on fertilizer or leachate, and leachate permits. A programming model uses the solutions of these bioeconomic...

This paper offers an alternative explanation for what is typically referred to as an asset pricing bubble. We develop a model that formalizes the Cochrane (2002) convenience yield theory of technology company stocks to explain why a rational agent would buy an “overpriced” security. Agents...