Essays on the impact of development on agricultural land amenities and values in Texas

Market land prices ignore the non-market value of ecosystem goods and services; hence, too much agricultural land may be developed. Correct land valuation must include these non-market values. Values of ecosystem services provided by the Richland-Chambers constructed wetlands are assessed through meta-analysis to derive confidence intervals for the willingness-to-pay (WTP) for wetland services. Replacement costs are also used to estimate cost savings of creating wetlands to cleanse river water instead of constructing a conventional wastewater treatment facility. Benefit transfer is used to estimate WTP for non-market agricultural land amenities. Ecosystem services of runoff in the western and recharge in the eastern part of Comal County based on hydrological models are also calculated. Finally, seemingly unrelated regression is used to quantify the effects of growth on current agricultural land values in Texas.;Using two different meta-analysis transfer functions, mean WTP for the Richland-Chambers wetlands are...