ESTIMATING THE EFFECTS OF FLOOD PROXIMITY ON AGRICULTURAL LAND VALUES IN IOWA
There is limited research on how flood events impact agricultural land values at large spatial scales. This paper examines the capitalization effects of flood proximity on farmland prices across 15,661 farmland transactions and 4,675 flood events in Iowa between 2007 and 2022. I employ a multilevel hedonic pricing model to estimate spatial and temporal flood proximity effects on farmland values. I test three specifications of spatial proximity — linear distance, discrete distance bands, and inverse-distance weighting — along with a continuous temporal proximity measure. Findings suggest significant price premiums for farmland further away from flood events, particularly within the first year after a flood event, with steep attenuation over time. These results have important implications for estimating the impact of flood risk across larger spatial scales, while suggesting that the price impact of flooding likely diminishes more quickly than the physical impact of flooding on agricultural land.