Federal land programs, such as the Conservation Reserve, provide land amenities with public goods attributes. Private land trusts supply related amenities through their holdings of land and conservation easements. We analyze, in a unique county-level panel, the effects of the federal programs on private land trust land preservation.

Shrift towards private ownership in forestry recourses in transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe promotes forest values and their development in diversified ways. In this paper, we provide a general equilibrium model assisting in estimation of forest management practices in the regional level by comparing different ownership structures and public policy measures. The model is applied for the county of Banská Bystrica in Slovakia.

The land restitution in Bulgaria led to a severe fragmentation in land ownership. This has an impact on the agricultural development and land market. The article investigates the land transactions on the sale and rentals markets. In order to explain the processes three new institutional economic theories will be employed: property rights theory, transaction costs theory and agricultural contract theory. First, the article reviews the appropriateness of each theory, and second, results of conducted survey in two regions of Bulgaria with different degrees of land fragmentation.

There is considerable interest in the determination of farmland values. Although alternative models exist, present value models have played a central role in recent studies of agricultural land markets. Alston (1986) uses a present value model to examine the effects of inflation and real growth in net rental income on farmland prices (see also Melichar, 1979).

Relative estimates of the proportion of agricultural land values generated by farm program payments and farm returns in the southern region are examined, using state-level data for the period 1940 to 2004. Results indicate the contribution of farm program payments to agricultural land values in the southern region has increased during the last three farm bill periods to 65 percent, compared to 22 percent in the other regions.

We investigate what farmland preservation programs reveal about the importance of protecting different rural amenities. An extensive content analysis of the enabling legislation of various farmland protection programs suggests wide variation exists in the protection of amenities. An analysis of 27 individual Purchase of Development Rights (PDR) programs' selection criteria suggests these programs favor preserving amenities that are jointly provided by cropland and livestock operations.

This paper jointly models a landowner's decision to develop a parcel and the option to enroll that parcel in a current use assessment program. The analytical results highlight different factors that influence the effectiveness of a current use program in delaying development. The results also underscore the difficulty a local government might have in influencing the behavior of the landowner. Except for altering eligibility rules, a local government employing current use assessment has but two policy tools: a penalty for development and the property tax rate.

Economists increasingly face opportunities to collaborate with ecologists on landscape-level analyses of socioeconomic and ecological processes. This often calls for developing empirical models to project land use change as input into ecological models. Providing ecologists with the land use information they desire can present many challenges regarding data, modeling, and econometrics. This paper provides an overview of the relatively recent adaptation of economics-based land use modeling methods toward greater spatial specificity desired in integrated research with ecologists.