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 variables such as output prices, input costs, and land quality. The statistical model may be extended to estimate subcounty land use shares and to incorporate data from federal land use surveys. We use the procedure to analyze the impact of changes in livestock inventories on soil erosion rates in three Iowa counties.
Publications
Modeling Land Use Decisions with Aggregate Data
Publication Name
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
Links
Author
Douglas J. Miller and Andrew J. Plantinga
Publisher
Ames, IA: American Agricultural Economics Association
Page Numbers
180-194
Publication Date
February 01, 1999
Publication Type
Articles
State
Iowa
Keywords
Environmental Issues