Oil and gas lease negotiations provide mineral owners the opportunity to negotiate for both compensation and auxiliary clauses that may protect their health and properties. We use optical character recognition to assemble a novel dataset of compensation and specific clauses in nearly 60,000...

This paper introduces endogenous property rights into a neoclassical growth model. 1t identifies a mechanism that generates growth rates which are increasing at low levels of capital. and decreasing at high levels of capital. The driving force behind changes in property rights is the attempt of...

When parties can bargain with each other in an externality situation, it is frequently argued that liability rules are preferable to property rules. The case for liability rules is thought to be strongest when the parties behave strategically, when the collective authority responsible for...

Property rights are widely prescribed for addressing overextraction of common pool resources, yet causal evidence of their effectiveness remains elusive. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design exploiting a...

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...

How do the different elements in the standard bundle of property rights - such as the right of possession or the right of transfer - differentially impact outcomes, such as urban development? This paper incorporates insecure property rights into a standard model of urban land prices and density,...

We examine the origins, persistence, and economic consequences of institutional structures of agricultural production. We compare farms in the Argentine Pampas and US Midwest, regions of similar potential input and output mixes. The focus is on 1910-1914, during the international grain trade...

We study the innovation and diffusion of technology at the industry level. We derive the full dynamic paths of an industry's evolution, from birth to its maturity, and we characterize the impact of diffusion on the incentive to innovate. The model implies that protection of innovators should be...

Standard approaches to environmental and natural resource use externalities generally focus on single-sector resources and user groups. Remedies include Pigouvian-style government constraints, small group controls following Elinor Ostrom, or less frequently, bargaining across users as outlined...

We analyze theoretically an institution called a "limited-tenure concession" for its ability to induce efficient public goods contribution and common-pool resource extraction. The basic idea is that by limiting the tenure over which an agent can enjoy the public good, but offering the...