This paper examines the impact of having a preservation program on the rate of farmland loss for a 50 year period (1949-1997) in six Mid-Atlantic States: Delaware, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Because farmland loss is affected by changing agricultural...

More than 124 governmental entities concerned about suburban sprawl and farmland loss have implemented farmland preservation programs preserving 1.67 million acres at a cost of $3.723 billion. We ask how effective are these programs in slowing the rate of farmland loss. Using a unique 50-year...

More than 110 state, county, and local governments have implemented agricultural land preservation programs to permanently preserve farmland. Assigning a value to the development is difficult and can be costly. Data was collected on 409 preservation transactions from 3 Maryland counties and...

This paper studies bidder behavior in an innovative program in which farmers compete to sell their development rights to the State. We derive a reduced form bidding model that includes both private value and common value components. This model allows us to estimate the role of bidder...

We examine if the farm sector has a critical mass. If a critical mass of farmland acres is needed to sustain a viable agricultural sector, agriculture profits may decline once a region has dropped below this threshold, causing the rate of farmland loss to accelerate. Agricultural census and...

The factors in uencing participation in both purchase of development rights and transfer of development rights farmland preservation programs are analyzed using data from a survey of agricultural landowners and from spatial data on individual farms collected using GIS for four Maryland counties....

In the spirit of Leamer'Â’s commitment to sensitivity analysis, we employ Farrell'Â’s nonparametric efficiency methodology and compare our results with those of Sexton, Wilson, and Wann. Testing the implicit assumption of technical efficiency in the methodology employed by Sexton, Wilson,...

Given growing concerns about the loss of farmland in the US, governmental and nonprofit groups are seeking innovative, cost-effective methods to preserve lands that will elicit additional landowner participation. This article describes four innovative farmland preservation techniques and derives...

A framework is developed to analyze a spatially dependent economically significant pest problem emanating from a source and spreading via a carrier such as an insect. Transmission and/or source control to combat the pest or disease problem are explored. Alternative assumptions about the...