Livestock grazing on public lands continues to be a source of intense conflict and debate. We analyze this problem using a dynamic game. Low grazing fees let ranchers capture more rent from grazing. This increases the incentive to comply with federally mandated regulations. Optimal grazing...

We imbed a classic fishery model, where the optimal policy follows a Most Rapid Approach Path to a steady state, into an overlapping generations setting. The current generation discounts future generations’ utility flows at a rate possibly different from the pure rate of time preference used...

The reality of protected area management is that enforcing forest and park boundaries is costly and so most likely incomplete, due in part to the pressures exerted on the boundaries by local people who often have traditionally relied on the park resources. Buffer zones are increasingly being...

This paper shows that the use of hyperbolic discounting in environmental regulation can have unfortunate consequences. In a three-period model we demonstrate that a planner who `naively` employs hyperbolic discounting and fails to anticipate problems of dynamic inconsistency, can oversee a...

We show that, in a model with substitutability between capital and resources, the path of sustainable development may be non-smooth, and may exhibit the overshooting property: starting from low levels of capital and resources, the economy may accumulate capital beyond its steady-state level,...