Adding realism to the Agglomeration Bonus: How endogenous land returns affect habitat fragmentation
Thadchaigeni Panchalingam,
Chian Jones Ritten,
Jason Shogren,
Mariah Tanner Ehmke,
Christopher T. Bastian and
Gregory M. Parkhurst
Ecological Economics, 2019, vol. 164, issue C, -
Abstract:
The Agglomeration Bonus has been shown to be a potentially successful policy to reunite fragmented habitat and increase conservation enrollment in laboratory testbed experiments. Yet, one key criticism has been that land prices have been assumed exogenous and fixed in these experiments. In the field, voluntary conservation enrollment by landowners will likely affect the value of the surrounding land. This endogeneity of land values suggests a discrepancy between results from laboratory experiments and true landowner decisions under a given policy. We address this concern by using an experimental design that accounts for the endogenous effect on surrounding land values from habitat conservation based on estimated returns from an actual landscape in eastern Wyoming as a case study. We show that without incorporating endogenous land values, traditional laboratory experiments likely will underestimate the amount of habitat fragmentation resulting from basic conservation policies without Agglomeration Bonuses. We also find that a low-cost Agglomeration Bonus can work to reunite this fragmented habitat, even under endogenous land value conditions. Our research indicates that through voluntary conservation decisions by private landowners, a more cost effective Bonus scheme can create contiguous habitat across privately held land, even when incorporating realistic endogenous land values.
Keywords: Agglomeration Bonus; Biodiversity conservation; Conservation Reserve Program; Endogenous land values; Land-use change; Pollinators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800918317907
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:164:y:2019:i:c:6
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106371
Access Statistics for this article
Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland
More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).