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...

Most U.S. farmers prepare their soil for seeding and weed and pest control through tillage—plowing operations that disturb the soil. Tillage practices affect soil carbon, water pollution, and farmers’ energy and pesticide use, and therefore data on tillage can be valuable for understanding...

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...

Rapid urbanization enhances the desirability of policies for preserving open space but those policies may expand the urban boundary and create leapfrog development. We investigate this potential conflict between open space preservation and urban sprawl conceptually and empirically using data...

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...

We examine different market-based mechanisms and other incentives intended to promote the environmental remediation and reuse of brownfields. Policies that encourage cleanup and re-use of brownfields offer real estate developers reductions in regulatory burden, relief from liability for future...

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 study proposes a novel approach to estimating a recreational demand model that accounts for intra-household resource allocation. The technique is based on an analogy borrowed from the literature of collective household behavior and, in particular, on Browning, Chiappori and Lewbel...