In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the North American agricultural frontier moved into semi-arid regions of the Great Plains where farming was vulnerable to drought. Farmers who migrated to the region had to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes to better fit the environment. But...

We examine government cartelization efforts in crude oil production. Texas and Saudi Arabia are alleged to act as swing producers to maintain the interstate (1933-1972) and OPEC (1973 on) oil cartels respectively. We analyze the political constraints that affected the ability of Texas and Saudi...

Rights-based institutions have been adopted for certain natural resources in order to more effectively mitigate the losses of the common pool. Past central government (command and control) regulation has not proved satisfactory. In deregulation, a major issue has been the assignment of those...

We examine the costs of the public trust doctrine in environmental and natural resource protection and conservation. We provide a model of litigation and settlement among disputing parties where the doctrine is applied. The model suggests that use of the public trust doctrine is likely to...

Rising urban and environmental demand for water has created growing pressure to re-allocate water from traditional agricultural uses. The evolution of water markets has been more complicated than those for other resources. In this paper, we first explain these differences by examining water...

We examine Harold Demsetz’s (1967) prediction that property rights will emerge and be refined once the benefits of doing so exceed the costs. We follow the development of property rights to oil and gas deposits in the United States to test this prediction. The pattern of development has been...

Open-access, common-pool resources, such as many fisheries, aquifers, oil pools, and the atmosphere, often require some type of regulation of private access and use to avoid wasteful exploitation. This paper summarizes the arguments and literature associated with this problem. The historical and...

In this paper we examine how an interest group with limited resources (votes and campaign contributions) nevertheless effectively influenced political policy through the control of information to general voters. Voters in turn lobbied politicians to take actions desired by the interest group....

Water markets in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) and the US west are compared in terms of their ability to allocate scarce water resources. The study finds that the gains from trade in the MDB are worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Total market turnover in water rights...

This paper examines the economic effects of the two dominant land demarcation systems, metes and bounds (MB) and the rectangular system (RS). Under MB property is demarcated by its perimeter as indicated by natural features and human structures and linked to surveys within local political...