Do Conservation Easements Reduce Land Prices? The Case of South Central Wisconsin

Kathryn Anderson and Diana Weinhold ()
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Kathryn Anderson: UNDP

Urban/Regional from EconWPA

Abstract: While theory strongly suggests that restricting development rights should reduce land prices, empirical evidence of this effect has been notoriously hard to obtain. Indeed, largely based on this difficulty a Congressional committee has recently recommended that tax benefits for such restrictions be severely curtailed. We collect data on 131 land transactions in South Central Wisconsin, including 19 cases of development-restricted parcels. When we use the whole sample to estimate the impact of conservation easements we replicate the results of Nickerson and Lynch (2001), finding a negative but statistically insignificant effect. However we then show that when the sample is appropriately restricted to a more homogenous group of land parcels, our ability to detect an effect increases dramatically. In particular, for vacant agricultural land we find a statistically significant negative impact of conservation easements that ranges up to 50% of land values

Keywords: land use; valuation of development rights; conservation easements; hedonic regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q24 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
Date: 2005-06-03
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 26. In this paper we use hedonic land price models to estimate the value of development rights.
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Working Paper: Do Conservation Easements Reduce Land Prices? The Case of South Central Wisconsin (2005)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpur:0506001

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