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 access to organic food is an important but overlooked factor in such studies. More recently, research focusing on food retailer marketing strategies for organic food finds that traditional strategies such as price promotions are largely unsuccessful with increasing sales for the organic food consumer. This article focuses on the retailer decision to offer organic food for sale. We model the decision as a two-stage process, where the retailer's first decision is whether to sell organic food, and the second decision determines how many different organic products to offer for sale. In doing so, by using data collected in stores, we assess the organic food retail landscape in Manhattan, NY. We find that the decision to offer organic food for sale depends on the neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics, and the amount of organic food offered for sale depends on the size of the store.

A difference-in-differences approach is used to measure the impact of new inner-city grocery store developments on residential housing values in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using geocoded housing sales from 1988–2011, we develop a hedonic model, exploiting temporal and spatial discontinuities, to identify the effect of 12 new grocery stores on neighborhood housing prices. Results suggest these new stores were associated with an increase in sale prices of nearby homes, and these results could help inform current policies related to urban food deserts, in that new grocery stores have the potential to improve neighborhood wealth as well as health.

Land system science axiomatically addresses social-environmental systems by integrating the dynamics of land uses (social) and land covers (environment), invariably including the use of remote sensing data and often, spatially explicit models of land change. This kind of research is illustrated through the Southern Yucatan Peninsular Region project (1997-2008) aimed at understanding, predicting, and projecting spatially explicit land change in a region with juxtaposed land uses-agriculture and a biosphere reserve. The successes of the project, its contributions to contemporary land system science, and the organizational mechanisms that fostered the research are identified as well as various corrections, which if applied, may have refined and extended the project's goals. Overall, the project demonstrates the kind of integrated research required to advance understanding of a social-environment system and the team-based methods used in the process.

Economic GeographyVolume 91, Issue 3 p. 381-383 book review The Oxford Handbooks of Land Economics Edited by Joshua M. Duke and Junjie WuNew York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Jacqueline Geoghegan, Jacqueline Geoghegan Clark UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Jacqueline Geoghegan, Jacqueline Geoghegan Clark UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 June 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/ecge.12096Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume91, Issue3July 2015Pages 381-383 RelatedInformation

The analyses of the causes and consequences of land use and land use change have always played a central role in economics, since at least Ricardo’s theory of land rent and von Thunen’s spatial mod...

The pace and pattern of land use change in the United States drives many communities to demand new policies due to both the environmental and fiscal impacts associated with the increasing urban and suburban landscape as well as questions of food security and global climate change resulting from the loss of farm and forest land. Between 1982 and 1997, U.S. population grew by 17 percent, while total urbanized land area grew by 47 percent (Fulton et al. 2001). However, the total amount of resource land lost is not the only concern to society: the location, distribution, and pattern of the land use change also matter. The pattern of land use determines the local government costs of providing infrastructure such as roads, schools, sewer, water, and other public services; the amount and type of nonpoint source pollution into water bodies; loss of farmland, forest, habitat, and other open space amenities; how much time people spend commuting—commute times have increased and contributed to negative air quality as well as to global climate change; and ecological effects including hydrological disturbances and habitat fragmentation. In addition, the amount of land converted per each person for new housing has been trending upward—almost doubling in the past 20 years. Since 1994, housing lots greater than 10 acres accounted for 55 percent of total land developed in the U.S. (Heimlich and Anderson 2001). Understanding the threshold impacts of different patterns—whether they relate to the percentage of impervious surface in a watershed, the impacts of and alternatives to achieving TMDLs (total maximum daily loads), or the number of acres of interior forests—has also become more important, but these threshold impacts are difficult to analyze given the modeling methods currently available. Numerous local, state, and federal regulations have the potential to affect land use patterns. Land use planning and regulation are usually functions of state and local governments, traditionally performed through zoning regulations and subdivision ordinances, as well as other related land use tools such as adequate public facilities ordinances, differential development fees, urban growth boundaries, and public provision of water and sewer. Local governments can also use market mechanisms such as transferable development rights to create incentives for development to occur in specific regions, or they can explicitly buy parcels of remaining open space. In addition, federal government activities can indirectly affect land use patterns. These include the allocation of resources for the transportation network and the deductions of mortgage interest and property taxes in the federal income tax code. However, in many cases, government policies can result in unintended consequences on the spatial pattern of land use and land use change, as they are not always implemented specifically to affect this pattern. Given these as motivating policy issues, spatially explicit economic modeling focusing on the pattern of land use change has increased dramatically in recent years, with advances in theoretical modeling as well as with innovations in methodology. Empirical advances have been facilitated by the availability of spatially explicit social science data. Applied economists have become increasingly interested in these issues as the availability of spatial data (remotely sensed data, such as satellite data, as well as other geo-referenced _________________________________________

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 2007, to test the effect of the creation of a new high-performing public school, as well as other locational amenities and disamenities on neighborhood housing prices, by comparing properties adjacent to either side of the school catchment area boundary.

This article studies the creation of commercial and industrial spaces and consequently jobs in suburban and exurban areas ofMontgomery County, MD - part of theWashington, 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 and sprawl - to examine employment decentralization, a dominant trend in the United States. In view of the actual and potential impacts of this form of urban development, we argue for the need for balanced attention to both residential and job decentralization due to inconclusive evidence on whether people follow jobs or firms follow people towards suburbia and exurbia. We test the significance of market conditions, local government growth controls and other factors as drivers of industrial and commercial land use change through discrete choice statistical models.

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 agricultural land-cover categories), using satellite data on land cover, linked with census socioeconomic data and other biophysical spatial data from 2000. The analysis is novel in that it is the first attempt to link detailed satellite data on land use, with on-the-ground estimates of carbon stocks in a spatial econometric model of land use. The estimated multinomial logit model is then used with two scenarios of future economic growth (“low growth” and “high growth” changes in population, agricultural land use, market access, and education levels) in the region to predict land-cover changes resulting from the economic growth. The per hectare carbon (C) stocks in each land-cover class are derived from previously published estimates of biomass from field sampling across the study region. We consider aboveground-only, aboveground plus soil, transient and non-transient pools of carbon. These estimates are scaled up to the total area in each class according to the predictions of the model baseline and the two development scenarios. Subsequently, the changes in carbon stocks resulting from the predicted land-cover changes are calculated. Under the low growth scenario, carbon stocks declined by 5%; under the high growth scenario, losses were 12%. Including soil C, the proportional losses were lower, but the absolute amount lost was more than double (to 6 Tg C under the low and almost 15 Tg C under the high-growth scenario). This methodology could be further developed for applications in global change policy, such as payments for environmental services (PES) or reduction in emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).

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 reinforcing investigative methods: (1) description and interpretation of direct evidence; (2) comparison of expected returns across main agricultural land uses; and (3) econometric modeling. We find that the increasing prominence of cattle ranching, or the prelude to it by planting pasture, is in part because of the constraints households face in family labor, one of the household’s key resources, and the relatively lower labor requirements of cattle ranching. The activity of cattle ranching fits particularly well with the constraints and incentives faced by the typical household in the region.

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 make it impossible to investigate fully the hypothesized causal chain from agricultural intensification to declines in cultivated areas and then to increases in spared land. We analyze the historical circumstances in which rising yields have been accompanied by declines in cultivated areas, thereby leading to land-sparing. We use national-level United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization data on trends in cropland from 1970–2005, with particular emphasis on the 1990–2005 period, for 10 major crop types. Cropland has increased more slowly than population during this period, but paired increases in yields and declines in cropland occurred infrequently, both globally and nationally. Agricultural intensification was not generally accompanied by decline or stasis in cropland area at a national scale during this time period, except in countries with grain imports and conservation set-aside programs. Future projections of cropland abandonment and ensuing environmental services cannot be assumed without explicit policy intervention.