When and if the United States chooses to implement a greenhouse gas reduction program, it will be necessary to decide whether carbon sequestration policies — such as those that promote forestation and discourage deforestation — should be part of the domestic portfolio of compliance...

We conduct a national-scale study of the determinants of agricultural land values to better understand how current farmland prices are influenced by the potential for future land development. The theoretical basis for the empirical analysis is a spatial city model with stochastic returns to...

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...

Understanding the causes and consequences of human migration has long been of interest to urban and regional economists. Empirical studies build on the theoretical results of Roback (1982) and Mueser and Graves (1995) by estimating the effects of wages, housing prices, and amenities on...

Governments contracting with private agents for the provision of an impure public good must contend with agents who would potentially supply the good absent any payments. This additionality problem is centrally important to the use of carbon offsets to mitigate climate change. We analyze optimal...

This paper examines the consequences of salience for the government provision of public goods. Salience is a common behavioral bias whereby people's attention is drawn to salient features of a decision problem, leading them to overweight prominent information in subsequent judgments. We analyze...

In this note, we propose an estimator for continuous-choice dynamic structural models. Our approach expands the class of models that can be estimated using the GMM methods in Hansen and Singleton (1982) by leveraging a theoretical result on stochastic Euler equations from Acemoglu (2009). We...