The effect of listing the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species on rural property values

•Landowners claim that ESA listings have a negative effect on property values.•The Lesser Prairie Chicken was listed and later de-listed under the ESA.•Difference-in-differences regressions were used to assess the listing's effect.•No significant effects on land prices were discovered in the preferred model.•Claims of negative effects by landowners may potentially be overstated.

This paper estimates the effect of Endangered Species Act protections for the lesser prairie chicken (Tympanuchus pallidicinctus) on rural property values in Oklahoma. The political and legal controversy surrounding the listing of imperiled species raises questions about the development restrictions and opportunity costs the Endangered Species Act imposes on private landowners. Examining parcel-level sales data before and after the listing of the endemic lesser prairie chicken, we employ difference-in-differences (DD) regression to measure the welfare costs of these restrictions. While our basic DD regression provides evidence the listing was associated with a drop in property values, this finding does not hold up in models that control for latent county and year effects. The lack of a significant price effect is confirmed by several robustness checks. Thus, the local economic costs of listing the lesser prairie chicken under the Endangered Species Act appear to have been small.