The housing boom and forest fires

Libertad Gonzalez

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Abstract: This paper provides evidence that the combination of land-use restrictions and an increasing demand for housing can create incentives to induce forest fires as a means to circumvent regulation and increase the supply of land available for residential construction. I estimate the effect of the price of housing on the incidence of forest fires using Spanish data by region for 1991-2005. The results suggest that higher house prices led to a significant increase in the incidence of forest fires in a region. I also find that the increased incidence of forest fires led to a subsequent reduction in forest area and an increase in urban land area. This evidence supports the claims often found in the media that property speculators trying to build in forest land may be behind the recent increases in the incidence of forest fires in Mediterranean countries.

Keywords: Forest fires; housing prices; land-use change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q23 R21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-env, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/papers/1060.pdf Whole Paper (application/pdf)

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:upf:upfgen:1060

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).