Assessing the local economic impacts of land protection

Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. We used panel data and a quasi-experimental impact-evaluation approach to determine how key economic indicators were related to the percentage of land protected. Specifically, we estimated the impacts of public and private land protection based on local area employment and housing permits data from 5 periods spanning 1990–2015 for all major towns and cities in New England. To generate rigorous impact estimates, we modeled economic outcomes as a function of the percentage of land protected in the prior period, conditional on town fixed effects, metro-region trends, and controls for period and neighboring protection. Contrary to narratives that conservation depresses economic growth, land protection was associated with a modest increase in the number of people employed and in the labor force and did not affect new housing permits, population, or median income. Public and private protection led to different patterns of positive employment impacts at distances close to and far from cities, indicating the importance of investing in both types of land protection to increase local opportunities. The greatest magnitude of employment impacts was due to protection in more rural areas, where opportunities for both visitation and amenity-related economic growth may be greatest. Overall, we provide novel evidence that land protection can be compatible with local economic growth and illustrate a method that can be broadly applied to assess the net economic impacts of protection. La protección de terrenos públicos o privados a menudo es controversial a nivel local debido a la preocupación que tienen los residentes por la pérdida de actividades económicas. Usamos un panel de datos y una estrategia casi experimental de evaluación de impacto para determinar cómo los indicadores clave están relacionados con el porcentaje de terrenos protegidos. En específico, estimamos los impactos de la protección de terrenos privados y públicos con base en el empleo en el área local y los datos de permisos residenciales en cinco periodos que abarcaron de 1990 a 2015 para las principales ciudades y pueblos de Nueva Inglaterra. Para generar estimaciones rigurosas de impacto modelamos los resultados económicos como una función del porcentaje de suelo protegido durante el periodo previo, condicional a los efectos fijados de la ciudad o el pueblo, las tende