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....

We conducted a nationwide field experiment in China to evaluate the direct and indirect impacts of assigning firms to public or private citizen appeals treatments when they violate pollution standards. There are three main findings. First, public appeals to the regulator through social media...

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...

Evidence on cannabis legalization's effects on mental health remains scarce, despite both rapid increases in cannabis use and an ongoing mental health crisis in the United States. We use granular geographic data to estimate medical cannabis dispensary availability's effects on self-reported...

We use data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco Use and Health (PATH), a longitudinal data set including self-reported and biomarker measures of tobacco use, to examine the effects of state-level tobacco 21 (T21) laws on smoking and vaping. T21 laws reduce self-reported cigarette smoking...

The governance and transaction cost insights of Oliver Williamson (1975, 1985, 1996, 2010) and Ronald Coase (1937, 1992) have framed antitrust polices and firm management strategies. Transaction cost economics explain efficient governance adaptation. With a focus on private efficiency gains...

Despite efforts to address the opioid crisis, opioid-related overdoses remain a significant contributor to mortality. State efforts to reduce overdose deaths by removing barriers to naloxone have recently focused on pharmacy channels, but the specifics of these laws and the contexts in which...

This paper investigates the impact of a pioneering pollution reduction program, the Ecological Compensation Initiative (ECI) in China, which establishes side payments between upstream and downstream provinces along the same river. The program includes both Coasian and pay-for-performance...

This paper applies principles of adverse selection to overcome obstacles that prevent the implementation of Pigouvian policies to internalize externalities. Focusing on negative externalities from production (such as pollution), we consider settings in which aggregate emissions are known, but...

The rise of shale gas and tight oil development has triggered a major debate about hydraulic fracturing (HF). In an effort to mitigate risks from HF, especially with respect to water quality, many U.S. states have introduced disclosure mandates for HF wells and fracturing fluids. We use this...