The Informational Content of Land Price and its Relevance for Environmental Issues

As the support of human and natural activities, land is a resource of major interest both for environmental and socio-economic issues. Research aimed at improving land management and conservation has long recognized the need to integrate both issues, but a consensual and consistent framework is still lacking. We argue that land price could be one of the possible links here, as a consistent proxy for some of the multiple dimensions of values that people put on land resources. We present the elementary economic theory about land price, namely the present value model, and we review the abundant empirical literature using this classical theory to study the informational content of land price. We then propose a typology of this literature, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses, in order to guide future environmental research which aim at drawing out some socio-economically oriented policy recommendations.