Do Governmental and Private Conservation Funds Crowd Out Open Space Spending?

There are many different vehicles that can be used to conserve land within towns. For example, towns can spend money on conservation through open space related expenditures in their budget, residents can vote on a referendum to fund conservation with bonds, private land trusts can purchase land development rights, and governmental grants can be used to fund conservation. The attraction or repulsion of funding sources for land conservation have only been investigated in some of these vehicles, however. Our paper investigates the spatial relationship between conservation funding sources that have not been examined before in a regression discontinuity framework.