This study examines the determinants of urbanized area across a 10,000-mile square swath in central North Carolina, an area undergoing extensive conversion of forest and agricultural land.We model the temporal and spatial dimensions of these landscape changes using a database that links five...

This paper advances an empirical model assessing how, over both time and space, changes in land-use respond to changing economic and ecological conditions. Focusing on Central North Carolina, a region that has undergone extensive changes in forest cover and agricultural lands over the past two...

The confluence of factors driving urban growth is highly complex, resulting from a combination of ecological and social determinants that co-evolve over time and space. Identifying these factors and quantifying their impact necessitates models that capture both why urbanization happens as well...

Focusing on individual motorists in car-owning households in Germany, this analysis econometrically investigates the determinants of automobile travel for non-work service activities against the backdrop of two questions: 1) Does gender play a role in determining the probability of car use and...

The Pollution Abatement Costs and Expenditures (PACE) Survey provides the only comprehensive source of data on polluation costs by manufacturing facilities in the U.S. Collected historically by the Bureau of Census until 1994, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Center...

This research estimates a hazard model of forest conversion in southern Mexico using geographical information systems, household survey data, and satellite imagery. A utility-maximizing model consistent with agricultural frontier conditions is developed. The econometric methodology incorporates...

This paper illustrates two techniques for calculating the statistical significance of the marginal effects derived from Heckman’s sample selection model,an increasingly common econometric specification in political science. The discussion draws on an analysis by Sweeney (2003) of the incidence...

Using a panel of household travel diary data collected in Germany between 1997 and 2005, this study assesses the effectiveness of fuel efficiency improvements by econometrically estimating the rebound effect, describing the extent to which higher efficiency causes additional travel.Following a...

Sample selection models, variants of which are the Heckman and Heckit models, are increasingly used by political scientists to accommodate data in which censoring of the dependent variable raises concerns of sample selectivity bias. Beyond demonstrating several pitfalls in the calculation of...

This note demonstrates that in applied regression analysis, the variance of a coefficient of interest may decrease from the inclusion of a control variable, contrasting with Clarke’s assertion (2005, 2009) that the variance can only increase or stay the same. Practitioners may thus be...