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Many watershed organizations have prioritized establishing streamside (riparian) buffers on agricultural land to improve water quality. Using data from a 2000 survey of 500 Maryland landowners, we examine what level of financial incentives they would require to install such buffers for 15 years...

We examine the role of spatial interactions in conservation easements placed on prairie pothole habitat in western Canada. One of the goals of the conservation easement program we study is to protect contiguous habitat. We identify endogenous spatial interactions among conservation easements and...

Approximately 40% of farmland is rented in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2011). In our survey, approximately ninety-five percent of the farmers that rent land also farm on their own land. This provides a unique empirical opportunity to assess the influence of ownership on farmers’ decision to...

The existing empirical literature on farmers' use of soil-conserving, runoff-reducing farming practices, while sizable, contains relatively little information on the influence of cost on adoption decisions and on how farmers combine multiple practices into an overall conservation package. Such...

This paper investigates the economic incentives for urban spatial expansion in China by estimating the value of urban land using an econometric model applied to data from the 220 largest Chinese cities for the period 1996-2003. The results are consistent with the proposition that the rapid rate...

Rapid urbanization enhances the desirability of policies for preserving open space but policies intended to preserve open space may extend the urban boundary and create leapfrog development. We investigate this potential conflict between open space preservation and urban sprawl conceptually and...

The existing empirical literature on farmers' use of soil-conserving, runoff-reducing farming practices, while sizable, contains relatively little information on the influence of cost on adoption decisions and on how farmers combine multiple practices into an overall conservation package. Such...

We investigate conceptually and empirically the role of economic incentives in the primary land allocation in China in recent years. A theoretical analysis demonstrates how recent fiscal and governance reforms give rise to land conversion decisions and long run urban spatial sizes much like...