We examine the value of terroir, which refers to the special characteristics of a place that impart unique qualities to the wine produced. We do this by conducting a hedonic analysis of vineyard sales in the Willamette Valley of Oregon to ascertain whether site attributes, such as slope, aspect,...

For several decades, economists have been concerned with the problem of optimal resource use under uncertainty. In many studies, researchers assume that prices evolve according to an exogenous stochastic process and solve the corresponding dynamic optimization problem to yield an optimal...

The problem of when to optimally harvest trees when timber prices evolve according to an exogenous stochastic process has been studied extensively in recent decades. However, little attention has been given to the appropriate form of the stochastic process for timber prices, despite the fact...

Land-use changes involve important economic and environmental effects with implications for international trade, global climate change, wildlife, and other policy issues. We use an econometric model to identify factors driving land-use change in the United States between 1982 and 1997. We...

We empirically investigate the effects of the Northwest Forest Plan on two widely-used economic indicators: employment growth and net migration. We find weak evidence that that setting aside 10 million acres of productive forest land for biodiversity protection had a large, but short-lived...

As with many environmental issues, debates about increasing public conservation lands in the Northern Forest region frequently center on a perceived tradeoff between jobs and the environment. In particular, opponents of conservation lands often argue that employment will decline significantly...

This study investigates the costs of subsidies for land retention and conversion, in addition to a policy that combines the incentives. A Markov model of forest and agricultural land use is estimated for the U.S. South Central region and used to simulate retention and conversion policies....

We develop a theoretical model of land prices and urban expansion and derive a reduced-form expression for agricultural land values. This result dictates the specification of our econometric model in terms of variable choice and functional form. We find strong support for the model in an...

In this article, we develop land use models to study the impact of changes in decision variables on soil erosion or other environmental outcomes. From an underlying behavioral model, we use maximum entropy to recover a parametric model of county-level land use shares as a function of decision...