IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ajagec/v89y2007i2p294-307.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Tenants, Landlords, and Soil Conservation

Author

Listed:
  • Erik Lichtenberg

Abstract

It has long been argued that tenants tend to overexploit land, but this conventional wisdom has been derived largely without consideration of landlords' actions. We examine what happens when landlords can invest in durable conservation measures in addition to choosing rental contract terms. When tenants are risk neutral, landlords overinvest in conservation under cash rental contracts but can achieve first best levels of output and protection against land degradation when conservation investment is combined with share rental. When tenants are risk averse, the first best is unattainable. In this case, conservation investment combined with share rental results in output levels below the first best, while equilibrium conservation investment may be greater or less than the first best. These results suggest that contract form and conservation investments are likely made simultaneously, so that econometric studies of conservation practice adoption that treat rental status as exogenous are likely subject to bias. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Erik Lichtenberg, 2007. "Tenants, Landlords, and Soil Conservation," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 89(2), pages 294-307.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:89:y:2007:i:2:p:294-307
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-8276.2007.00990.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pouta, Eija & Myyra, Sami & Hanninen, Harri, 2009. "Heterogeneous farmland owners: two approaches for objective based classification," 2009 Conference, August 16-22, 2009, Beijing, China 50787, International Association of Agricultural Economists.
    2. B. James Deaton & Chad Lawley & Karthik Nadella, 2018. "Renters, landlords, and farmland stewardship," Agricultural Economics, International Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 49(4), pages 521-531, July.
    3. Awudu Abdulai & Renan Goetz, 2014. "Time-Related Characteristics of Tenancy Contracts and Investment in Soil Conservation Practices," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 59(1), pages 87-109, September.
    4. Wang, Tong & Luri, Moses & Janssen, Larry & Hennessy, David A. & Feng, Hongli & Wimberly, Michael C. & Arora, Gaurav, 2017. "Determinants of Motives for Land Use Decisions at the Margins of the Corn Belt," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(C), pages 227-237.
    5. Youngho Kim, 2024. "Payments for Ecosystem Services Programs and Climate Change Adaptation in Agriculture," Economics Series Working Papers 1054, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    6. Katrin Daedlow & Nahleen Lemke & Katharina Helming, 2018. "Arable Land Tenancy and Soil Quality in Germany: Contesting Theory with Empirics," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 10(8), pages 1-15, August.
    7. Foudi, Sébastien, 2012. "The role of farmers' property rights in soil ecosystem services conservation," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 90-96.
    8. Wang, Tong & Luri, Moses & Janssen, Larry & Hennessy, David & Feng, Hongli & Wimberly, Michael & Arora, Gaurav, 2016. "Farmers’ Rankings of the Determinants of Land Use Decisions at the Margins of the Corn Belt," 2016 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Boston, Massachusetts 235109, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    9. repec:ags:aaea22:335971 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Goetz, Renan & Yatsenko, Yuri & Hritonenko, Natali & Xabadia, Angels & Abdulai, Awudu, 2019. "The dynamics of productive assets, contract duration and holdup," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 24-37.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:89:y:2007:i:2:p:294-307. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.