Using continental grids to improve our understanding of global land supply responses: Implications for policy-driven land use changes in the Americas By

Global economic models with explicit treatment of global land markets are crucial to understanding the consequences of different policy choices on global food and environmental security. However, these models rely on parameters for which there is little econometric evidence. A fundamental parameter in these models is the land supply elasticity. We provide a novel set of land supply elasticities estimated using gridded data for the American continent, and we use them in exploring previous work on the indirect land-use effects of US ethanol policy. Our estimates provide a basis for better-informed simulations of global land-use transitions under different economic and policy scenarios. JEL Codes: Q24, C21, C68 ∗Villoria (corresponding author) is a Research Assistant Professor and Liu is a Post-Doctoral Fellow, both with the Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University. Please address correspondence to Nelson Villoria: [email protected]. This work has been possible due to generous support from the Energy Policy Research Institute, the Geospatial Building Blocks project (NSF Grant #1261727), and the GEOSHARE project.