Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item An empirical analysis of hunting leases by timber firms(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2007) Cook, Frank Chase; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: David E. Buschena.Private hunting lease agreements offer an example of the private provision (land access) of a public resource (wildlife). Privately owned forests play an important role in wildlife conservation because of land ownership and recreation trends in the United States. The implicit values in hunting lease markets are important to understanding market incentives of wildlife access leasing. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the underlying marginal values of annual hunting leases agreements. In this thesis, the hedonic valuation technique is used to empirically estimate two forms of consumer response: competitive bidding results in the Georgia hunting lease market and consumer response to take-it-or-leave-it prices in a Northern hunting lease market. The Georgia lease regressions use forest stand and regional attributes to predict observed lease prices. The Northern lease regressions use the firm's lease offering price and additional lease information to predict observed consumer response to lease offering prices. The consumer responses for the Northern regressions include lease applications per new hunting lease offering and renewal of pre-existing hunting lease agreements.Item Property taxes on land and land use(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 1992) Fox, Linette Sue; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Douglas J. Young.All fifty U.S. states have some form of property tax relief for agricultural land. Preferential assessment of agricultural land for property taxes distorts the like treatment of equally valuable real property. However, property taxes are administered as a part of the nation's tax system. The effect of preferential assessment for agricultural land must be evaluated within the tax system. A formal model of land values and times of converting agricultural land to urban uses is developed in this thesis. A property tax on land, a rollback tax, an income tax, and a capital gains tax are applied to the model, and the optimal time of conversion is examined. Comparative static results are discussed by simulating the tax rates. Property tax preferences for agricultural land, when administered in a vacuum, delay conversion to urban uses. Rollback taxes, intended to penalize conversion of land out of agricultural uses, have little effect on the allocation of land. Land rents and capital gains are effectively untaxed for land in owner-occupied housing. Property tax preferences are small in comparison with these preferences for land in owner-occupied housing; thus, the tax system's bias is to allocate more land to housing. However, land rents and capital gains are taxed for land in commercial use, allocating land to agricultural over commercial uses. The effect of the property tax is to reduce the allocation of land to commercial uses and to mitigate the bias created by other taxes when land is converted to housing. Thus, the current tax policy does not necessarily promote an inefficient allocation of land.Item The Conservation Reserve Program and future use of enrolled land in Montana(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 1992) Sheard, Michael David; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: James B. Johnson.The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), as authorized by the Food Security Act of 1985 is a voluntary cropland retirement program which relies primarily upon positive economic incentives to farm operators in order to entice them to convert cropland considered highly erodible or otherwise environmentally sensitive into a conserving use for a ten-year period. Through 1989, Montana farm operators enrolled nearly 2.7 million acres of cropland into the CRP. The first CRP contracts were entered into in 1986 and thus will expire in 1995. Under current policy, once the ten year period is over, cropland enrolled in the CRP can be returned to annual cropping, can be used in some alternative commercial use such as haying or grazing, or can remain in a conserving use. There is much concern in Montana and other states over how the future use of these acres could affect commodity prices, farm incomes, government outlays, rural economic activity, and environment quality. This study examines the factors to be used by individual Montana CRP contract holders upon contract expiration to decide the disposition of their CRP land among the alternative uses. A firm level mean-variance decision model is used to incorporate the risk involved with each alternative. The model also considers any one-time start-up costs that may be incurred to convert CRP acres into an alternative use. Test results using survey data from Montana contract holders suggest that very few CRP acres in Montana will remain in a conserving use. Most respondents indicated that they plan to either return all of their CRP acreage to annual cropping, or will hay/graze all of the acreage. The results suggest that the greater the percentage of income derived from range livestock, the more likely the CRP land will be hayed or grazed. Similarly, the greater the percentage of income derived from cropping, the more likely the CRP land will be returned to annual cropping. The evidence is that more CRP land will be hayed or grazed on operations that currently have haying/grazing activities, or that have physical attributes to facilitate haying/grazing activities.