Economic Development and Public Finance Working Paper Series

Send this to a friend FULL TEXT: Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf, 7.78 MB)

This paper examines the ability of proportional hazard models to evaluate changes in land use through time. There are three specific objectives: (i) to review previous research on the complexity of urbanization and explain how the spatial hazard framework accommodates that complexity; (ii); to estimate a series of spatial hazard models characterizing land use in the 25 highest-growth core based statistical areas of the United States areas in 1990, 2000, and 2006; and (iii) to use the estimation results to track land use change region-by-region over the 16-year timeframe. Overall, the analysis reveals that the spatial hazard framework offers an effective means of describing land use change. Along the way, it also illustrates that the classic (Alonso 1964; Muth 1969; Mills 1972) model of urbanization continues to hold in an evermore-complex world — albeit, in an explicitly uncertain and inherently chaotic manner.
Key Words: Land use, urbanization, sprawl, spatial hazard models, point pattern analysis; JEL classification: C21; C41; R12; R14