The causal structure of land price determinants

This paper investigates causation contemporaneously and dynamically to elucidate the persistent lack of agreement about what "causes" changes in farmland prices. The analysis synthesizes and extends previous investigations in this area by employing a combination of directed acyclic graphs (DAG), a recently developed modeling technique, and cointegrated VAR model. DAG theory and algorithms offer a powerful tool for analyzing contemporaneous causal relationships among economic variables. The results from this study confirm the importance of measures of return to farming, financial (credit market constraints) and/or macroeconomic activity as significant determinants of fluctuations in farmland prices.