Jacqueline Geoghegan

• Clark University

Retail sales of organic food products have been increasing faster than any other category of food and have penetrated mainstream retail grocery outlets. The majority of the literature on organic markets explores the socioeconomic characteristics of consumers, linking these traits to the probability of buying organic food, and it suggests that acces...

The Economics of Land Use Change: Advancing the Frontiers - Volume 40 Issue 3 - Lori Lynch, Jacqueline Geoghegan

A regression discontinuity approach is used to measure the impact of public-goods creating programs in a declining inner city neighborhood of Worcester Massachusetts. Using GIS data, we develop a hedonic model of residential sales, using a parcel-level GIS tax assessment and land use database linked to property sales data for the years 1988 through...

To assess the impact of land-use change on carbon stocks, we apply a new methodology, linking ecological and economic modeling, to southern Yucatan, Mexico. A spatial econometric multinomial logit model of ten land-cover classes is estimated (four primary forest categories, three secondary growth categories, an invasive species, and two agricultura...

We investigate the problem of understanding the drivers of land use and its change in the southern Yucatán region. Our household data drawn from villages across the region show that as the amount of land devoted to crop cultivation has fallen, the amount of land devoted to pastureland has increased. We investigate this trend using a suite of three...

This article studies the creation of commercial and industrial spaces and consequently jobs in suburban and exurban areas of Montgomery County, MD – part of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. We utilize a spatially explicit framework of land use change analysis – which to date, has been applied solely in studies of residential decentralization...

Does the intensification of agriculture reduce cultivated areas and, in so doing, spare some lands by concentrating production on other lands? Such sparing is important for many reasons, among them the enhanced abilities of released lands to sequester carbon and provide other environmental services. Difficulties measuring the extent of spared land...

The papers in this special issue, resulting from two workshops intended to chart the way forward for studies of complex land-use dynamics, suggest that the paradigm of ‘complexity’, in its multiple meanings, raises both new opportunities and new challenges that require multidisciplinary attention. The opportunities include the potential to explore...

The southern Yucatán peninsular region (SYPR) project seeks to demonstrate the value of “integrated land-change science” approaches to understanding tropical deforestation and land-use and land-cover change in the region in question. Ecological, social, and remote sensing-GIS sciences are joined in an examination of political economic forces drivin...

Farmland preservation programs compensate landowners who enroll for the value lost due to the the restrictions on development applied to their land. These restrictions in principle decrease the value of the land. Yet few studies have found strong statistical evidence that preserved parcels sell for lower prices than unpreserved parcels. We use both...

An evaluation on the effects of the Adequate Public Facility Ordinance (APFO) has been conducted on new residential development in Howard County, Maryland. APFO has been used in some counties in Maryland in order to implement smart growth initiatives as the city is one of the fastest growing places in the US. In order to have an insight to the APFO...

Plant invasions and their impact on land use pose difficult research questions, due to the complex relationships between the ecological nature of the invasion and the human responses to the invasion. This paper focuses on the linkages between an invasion of bracken fern and land use decisions in an agricultural frontier in southern Mexico. Agricult...

Two spatially explicit econometric land use change models are presented, focusing on tropical deforestation caused by agricultural expansion in the southern Yucatn peninsula, Mexico. The two models developed are both based on conceptually similar theoretical models of farmer behavior. However, there are different empirical specifications of this th...

The authors analyze the consequences of imperfect output markets for the land-use decisions of semi-subsistence farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern Mexico. The approach is motivated by previous applications of the agriculture household model establishing that the farm household’s productionand consumptiondecisions are analytically nonse...

A range of research interests beyond global environmental change science increasingly calls for advances in land-change models and, specifically, models that have fine-grained locational outputs. The rationale for such modeling about land change has been articulated elsewhere in this book (Ch. 1; Introduction to Part IV) and need not be reiterated...

This highly topical study of tropical deforestation reports on the first phase of a large, integrated, multi- institutional, and team-based study. Based in Mexico, it is designed to understand and project land changes in a development frontier that pits the rapidly growing needs of smallholder farmers to cut down forests for cultivation against fed...

The southern Yucatan peninsular region is a seasonal tropical forest biome that experiences drought, hurricane, and agricultural disturbance. Substantial agricultural expansion over the past 50 years has opened and fragmented much of the forest surrounding the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, posing a series of threats to the coupled human-environment s...

We analyze the consequences of imperfect output markets for the land-use decisions of semi-subsistence farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern Mexico. Our approach is motivated by previous applications of the agriculture household model establishing that the farm household´s model estabblishing that the farm household´s production and consu...

Tropical deforestation is significant to a range of themes that have relevance for the study of environmental change and economic development, including global warming, land degradation, species extinction, and sustainability issues. Recognition that both the location and pattern of forest clearance are often as important as its magnitude has motiv...

As many local and state governments in the United States grapple with increasing growth pressures, the need to understand the economic and institutional factors underlying these pressures has taken on added urgency. From an economic perspective, individual land use decisions play a central role in the manifestation of growth pressures, as changes i...

Using a unique spatial database, a hedonic model is developed to estimate the value to nearby residents of open space purchased through agricultural preservation programs in three Maryland counties. After correcting for endogeneity and spatial autocorrelation, the estimated coefficients are used to calculate the potential changes in housing values...

Understanding determinants of land use in developing countries has become a priority for researchers and policy makers with a wide range of interests. For the vast majority of these land use issues, the location of change is as important as its magnitude. This overview paper highlights new economic approaches to modeling land use determinants that...

We estimate a spatially explicit model of the forest clearance process among smallholder farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern Mexico. Our analysis takes as its point of departure a simple utility-maximising model that suggests many possible determinants of deforestation in an economic evironment characterised by missing or thin markets H...

Understanding determinants of land use in developing countries has become a priority for researchers and policy makers with a wide range of interests. For the vast majority of these land use issues, the location of change is as important as its magnitude. This overview paper highlights new economic approaches to modeling land use determinants that...

We estimate a spatially explicit model of the forest clearance process among smallholder farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern Mexico. Our analysis takes as its point of departure a simple utility-maximising model that suggests many possible determinants of deforestation in an economic environment characterised by missing or thin markets....

The preservation of open spaces has become an important policy topic in many regions. Policy tools that have been used include: cluster zoning; transferable development rights; proposed land taxes to fund purchases of remaining open spaces; and private organizations that buy land. This paper develops a theoretical model of how different types of op...

The tensions between development and preservation of tropical forests heighten the need for integrated assessments of deforestation processes and for models that address the fine-tuned location of change. As Mexico’s last tropical forest frontier, the southern Yucatán peninsular region witnesses these tensions, giving rise to a “hot spot” of tropic...

This paper presents some initial modeling results from a large, interdisciplinary research project underway in the southern Yucatán peninsular region. The aims of the project are: to understand, through individual household survey work, the behavioral and structural dynamics that influence land managers’ decisions to deforest and intensify land use...

Questions of land use/land cover change have attracted interest among a wide variety of researchers concerned with modeling the spatial and temporal patterns of land conversion and understanding the causes and consequences of these changes. Among these, geographers and natural scientists have taken the lead in developing spatially explicit models o...

This research estimates a hazard model of forest conversion in southern Mexico using geographical information systems, household survey data, and satellite imagery. A utility-maximizing model consistent with agricultural frontier conditions is developed. The econometric methodology incorporates temporal dynamics into the otherwise static range of a...

An implication of the von Liebig hypothesis is that crop-production functions have right-angle isoquants. This article presents a nonparametric estimation of right-angle isoquant production functions. It then describes a new test for right-angle isoquants. The procedures are used to test experimental data on corn and wheat.

This paper develops a spatial hedonic model to explain residential values in a region within a 30-mile radius of Washington DC. Hedonic models of housing or land values are commonplace, but are rarely estimated for non-urban problems and never using the type of spatial data (geographical information system or GIS) available to us. Our approach offe...

The economic valuation of ecosystems has attracted the attention of both scientists and policy makers in recent years. However, most of the research in the past on this topic has been isolated within the individual paradigms of ecology and economics, with little interaction between the two. Unfortunately, this autonomous style of scholarship has le...

The chapter uses a regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Los Angeles basin to analyze the economic impact on the regional economy of instituting a “marketable permit” scheme to reduce air pollution. The model includes 16 producing sectors and considers three pollutants: nitrogen oxides, reactive organic gases, and sulfur dioxid...

Abstract submitted to MaGrann conference March 2008, Rutgers University. There have been many,excellent reviews of the many,different kinds of existing models applied to land-use change (see, for example, Kaimowitz and Angelson, 1998; Briassoulis, 2000; Irwin and Geoghegan, 2001; U.S. EPA, 2000; Agarwal, et al. 2002; Bell and Irwin, 2002; Nelson an...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-97). Microfilm. s