Land use has become a critical issue for Minnesota communities, and for many of those on the suburban fringe, the central land-use policy question is whether or not to approve new residential development. New residences may bring increased property tax revenues, but the new residents will demand...

A modified version of this article has been published in the May 2007 issue of the journal Ecological Economics. This paper presents the first comprehensive analysis of municipal-level open space referenda, both the decision to hold a referendum and referendum results, across the entire...

The USDA has used bidding to enroll land into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and may use similar mechanisms to implement other policy instruments in which some or all agricultural land cropping rights are acquired to protect or increase environmental amenities. Experience with the CRP...

The experience of other Eastern and Central European countries would suggest that in Albania, as the market for real property develops, there should also be developments in services that support real property transactions. A competitive and transparent market is usually facilitated by the...

With few exceptions, induced innovation theories give little consideration to the role of distortions or externalities as determinants of the commodity or factor biases of innovations demanded by farmers. Nor has the theory devoted much attention to the influence of technical progress, with or...

The effects of property rights on investment are typically hypothesized to occur through a security-induced investment demand and a collateral-based credit supply. Using a two period model, this paper shows that for farms that are constrained in their access to liquidity, the investment demand...

In contrast to literature which focuses on the how collective action problems inhibit the supply of efficient institutions, this paper uses dynamic stochastic general equilibrium methods to study the demand for institutional innovation. Focusing on the innovation of alienabile land rights in the...

The CLUES model is an integrated catchment based model that designed to assist policy makers in understanding the implications of land use scenarios for water quality and a range of other indicators. CLUES integrates a number of existing models from several research providers, including SPARROW...

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/29/10.

Water quality trading (trading) as a means to improve water quality has become an increasingly popular instrument considered by environmental policy makers. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists more than forty current trading programs in the U.S., only a few active markets...