Philippine agrarian reform involves compulsory purchase of private farmlands. Several landowners were suspected of either using land use conversions (LUCs) to pre-empt expropriation, or choosing market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) options to retain effective control of their farmland. However, there has been no statistically-tested empirical evidence to support anecdotal claims that these were adopted by landowners to protect private property rights. Before testing whether LUCs have been used solely to avoid land redistribution, this article provides a theoretical framework that treats the reform as a price intervention policy since compensation is usually below market value. This article’s novelty lies in its application of Cheung’s theory of price control to explain how land redistribution could change the use of productive asset through LUC, or the contractual arrangement of involved parties through MLAR. Afterwards, this study employs feasible generalized least squares regression, where the effect of compulsory land redistribution on MLAR and LUC are tested to investigate the hypothesis that LUC was largely induced by agrarian reform. The results show that some LUC and MLAR were induced by the risk of expropriation, although in the case of former only when the risk of expropriation is high. Based on Cheung's theory of price control, the response choice should depend on the transaction costs associated with each of the alternatives. The theoretical framework suggests that some landowners may have preferred MLAR first before considering LUC, which is posited as one reason why the proportion of expropriation-induced LUC may not have been as high as some might like to claim.

菲律宾的土地改革涉及强制购买私人农田。一些土地所有者被怀疑使用土地用途转换 (LUC) 来预先征用，或选择市场主导的土地改革 (MLAR) 选项来保持对其农田的有效控制。然而，没有经过统计检验的经验证据支持土地所有者采用这些措施来保护私有产权的传闻。在检验土地使用权是否仅用于避免土地再分配之前，本文提供了一个理论框架，将改革视为价格干预政策，因为补偿通常低于市场价值。本文的创新之处在于应用张氏的价格控制理论来解释土地再分配如何通过LUC改变生产性资产的使用，或相关方通过 MLAR 的合同安排。之后，本研究采用可行的广义最小二乘回归，检验强制土地再分配对 MLAR 和 LUC 的影响，以调查 LUC 主要由土地改革引起的假设。结果表明，一些 LUC 和 MLAR 是由征用风险引起的，尽管在前者的情况下仅当征用风险很高时。根据 Cheung 的价格控制理论，响应选择应取决于与每个备选方案相关的交易成本。理论框架表明，一些土地所有者可能在考虑 LUC 之前首先选择 MLAR，这被认为是征用引起的 LUC 比例可能没有某些人声称的那么高的原因之一。