This study examines the impact of farmland investments on the risk-efficiency of mixed asset portfolios. Traditional asset classes considered available for investment include various equity market indices, commercial REITs, corporate bonds of investment- and sub investment grade, government bonds and treasury bills, corporate bonds, ex-U.S. equity indices, short term interest rate indexes, and commodity investments. Unlevered farmland returns were constructed at the state level as the sum of cash rent and capital gains less property taxes as a fraction of asset values.

Land as a resource of agricultural production is not fully exploited in Latvia, as approximately 400 thousand ha, according to the data in the identification system of agricultural parcels, were undeclared for the Single Area Payment Scheme in 2012 and, of the agricultural area, 10 % was uncultivated and 2% was overgrown. It creates unique opportunities and a potential for enhancing the management and use of land in the future to increase the output of agricultural products.

In agricultural industry of the Republic of Belarus the problem of increasing the effectiveness of utilization of land resources appears one of the most actual. Annual alienation of agricultural lands and arable fields under housing construction and industrial buildings, roads and other economic object leads to implacable decline of agricultural areas. Absence of new lands, suitable for agricultural use, promotes increase of agricultural productivity by means of intensification of producing process.

The impact of soil conservation adoption on yield and yield risk is investigated using a conditionally heteroskedastic production function with endogenous switching. Analysis shows that controlling for plot-specific factors, adopters exhibit lower yields and higher yield variance than non-adopters. Regression results indicate soil conservation increases yields and reduces yield variance.

The material contained herein is supplementary to the article named in the title and published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Volume 88, Number 4, November 2006.

Land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa reduces the land's potential productivity through soil erosion, nutrient depletion, soil moisture stress, deforestation and overgrazing. Efforts to reverse land degradation require an understanding of why it takes place and what factors govern farmers' willingness to invest in land conservation. These factors differ importantly between private and public lands.

The effect on housing prices of proximity to different types of parks is estimated using a unique data set of single-family homes sold between 1990 and 1999 in Greenville, South Carolina. While the value of park proximity is found to vary with respect to park size and amenities, the estimates from this study are larger than previous studies. The greatest impact on housing values was found with proximity to small neighborhood parks, with the positive impact of proximity to both small and medium-size parks extending to homes as far as 1500 feet from the park.

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 decades, landscape dynamics are modeled by exploiting a spatial database that links several satellite images spanning the years 1975-1999 to a suite of socioeconomic, institutional and GIS-created explanatory variables.

Turkey is homeland of the grapevine (Vitis spp.), one of the most important agricultural products in the World. Our country, having the favorable climatic conditions for viticulture, has an important role among the viticulture farming countries of the World. The objective of this study is to determine potential growing areas of grape in Turkey by using Geographic Information Systems techniques based on topographic and climatic factors. It is important to efficiently use of our limited arable lands from the agricultural point of view.

This paper analyses the enforcement of the 2003 CAP reform in 5 countries of the West European Union: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and United Kingdom. The reform gives multiple possibilities of adaptation at a national or regional level.