Taking advantage of randomly-assigned federal mineral rights, the first essay establishes the discount that mineral developers place on oil and gas leases with divided ownership. This discount is interpreted as an expectation of reduced profits as a result of transaction costs incurred in...

The formation of harvest cooperatives has recently generated considerable interest among fishermen and regulators as an alternative to other rights-based systems such as individual transferable quotas. Many consider the promotion of self-governance to be essential to more sustainable, equitable...

Consumer decisions regarding quality or attribute differentiated goods, involve discrete or qualitative choice regarding an exhaustive set of mutually exclusive alternatives determined by preferences over the attributes that characterize the alternatives, not over the alternatives themselves....

Random utility models rely on the properties of the logistic distribution for ease of estimation, but this distribution implies the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA). The random parameters logit model offers a means of avoiding the IIA assumption as well as greater heterogeneity...

This paper reviews modern techniques for estimating the benefits of goods which are not bought and sold in markets, paying special attention to the kinds of empirical studies that applied economists have faced in analyzing recent projects. The methods which are described and evaluated include...

One option for the disposal of sewage sludge is land spreading, including application to private croplands. Land spreading may allow some of the sewage treatment costs to the municipality or county to be offset by farmers' payments for sludge as a crop producing resource. This study investigates...

This paper examines the criticism of contingent valuation put forth by Blamey, Common and Quiggin (Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 1995, vol. 39, pp. 264–288). They argue that households have consistent preferences over private goods but not jointly consistent...