Agricultural rent in land-use models: comparison of frequently used proxies

Agricultural rent in land-use models: comparison of frequently used proxies. Spatial Economic Analysis. This paper compares the performance of econometric land-use models based on three proxies for agricultural land rent: farmers’ revenues, land prices and shadow land prices derived from a mathematical programming model. We consider different land-use classes (agriculture, pasture, forest, urban and other), different determinants (economic, physical and demographic) of land-use shares and different spatial econometric specifications. It is found that the inclusion of spatial components significantly improves the quality of predictions. In terms of economic interpretation, the shadow land prices provide the most stable and intuitive results.