Grid-Level Computable Modeling for Policy Analysis of Agriculture, Land Use, and the Environment

Open online seminar with Zhan Wang, Department of Food and Resource Economics.

Zhan's description of the seminar

While policies targeting agriculture, land use, and the environment generate fundamentally spatial impacts, most economic models analyze such impacts at the national scale, without accounting for critical spatial heterogeneity and subnational spillover effects.

In this seminar, I introduce a novel grid-level computable modeling framework to overcome these limitations. By integrating high-resolution geospatial data on land use and crop production with an economic equilibrium structure, this framework captures spatially explicit policy impacts while endogenously accounting for cross-regional spillovers.

I demonstrate the framework's capabilities using two policy applications in Brazil: transportation infrastructure expansion and biofuel production. The results reveal that while aggregate national impacts may appear modest, these policies generate substantial and highly heterogeneous responses at the local level. Furthermore, spatial spillovers within Brazil play a critical role in shaping land use consequences and can substantially alter policy evaluations when compared with analyses that overlook subnational interactions.

These findings highlight the importance of incorporating spatially explicit data and grid-level economic mechanisms into economic modeling for credible policy assessment.

How to participate

The seminar is open to all.
The seminar will take place online via Zoom