Natural resources such as carbon, water, and fish are increasingly managed with markets that require an initial allocation of property rights. In practice these rights are typically grandfathered based on historical use, but rights could be allocated any number of ways. Taking the perspective of...

This article develops and implements a Real Option approach to value renewable natural resources in the case of Marine Fisheries. The model includes two sources of uncertainty: the resource biomass and the price of fish, and it can be used by fisheries to optimally adapt their harvesting...

Input subsidies in natural resource sectors are widely believed to cause depletion of the natural capital on which those sectors rely. But identification and data challenges have stymied attempts to empirically estimate the causal effect of subsidies on resource extraction. China's fishing fleet...

Open access, competitive exploitation can be incredibly damaging to valuable resources and the human populations that depend upon them. Even though wealth, resource rents and stocks are at stake, open access often seems to be ineffectively addressed across time and space. Institutions vary....

Non-target marine fish species and ocean ecosystems are increasingly valuable. Ongoing efforts to preserve them emphasize spatial controls on human entry and use via Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). They cover 7.6% of world oceans and aim for 30% by 2030 under the Convention for Biological...

This paper presents a synopsis of recent NBER studies of the history of corporate governance in Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Together, the studies underscore the importance of path dependence, often as...

In a multiperiod investment framework, firms with high expected growth earn higher expected returns than firms with low expected growth, holding investment and expected profitability constant. This paper forms cross-sectional growth forecasts, and constructs an expected growth factor that yields...

The literature on the optimal harvest of fisheries has concentrated on a single fishing area with biomass uncertainty and to a lesser degree also with price uncertainty. We develop and implement a stochastic optimal control approach to determine the harvest that maximizes the value of a fishery...

Middlemen are ubiquitous in supply chains. In developing countries they help bring products from remote communities to end markets but may exert strong market power. We study a cooperative intervention which organizes together poor fishing communities in the Amazon -- one of the poorest and most...

Extending recent results in the industrial organization literature (Carvajal et al. 2013), we de-rive non-parametric tests of behavior consistent with the tragedy of the commons model. Our approach derives testable implications of such behavior under any arbitrarily concave, differentiable...