I discuss the contributions that rigorous economic analysis can make in improving our understanding of international environmental agreements (IEAs). Specifically, I do this by analyzing the intellectual contributions of 14 post-1990 theoretical and empirical papers about the design of IEAs

This paper analyzes the problem faced by an imperfectly informed supra-national governmental authority (SNGA) with restricted funds that wishes to design an International Environmental Agreement (IEA) for developing countries (DCs). The SNGA contracts with polluting firms through their...

Economists and ecologists are in agreement that economic and ecological systems are connected and that these systems should be studied as one system. However, because this recognition has been rather recent, neither economists nor ecologists have studied the short run behavior of jointly...

We focus on the interaction between a representative polluting tannery and a negatively impacted small farmer in Kanpur, India. The tannery produces leather and toxic chemical waste that ends up in wastewater used by the small farmer to irrigate agricultural land and grow vegetables. The waste...

The extant literature tells us that a seaport inspector who places a large (small) weight on biological invasion damage control relative to economic cost reduction will, ceteris paribus, inspect ships with containers more (less) stringently. Therefore, in this theoretical note we analyze the...

Researchers have raised two concerns about the current patent approval process by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). First, it takes too long to process applications. Second, examiners make too many errors in the approval process. The first concern suggests that examiners...

We propose a research agenda for studying six basic questions about the impacts of alternate international invasive species control mechanisms on economic agents in a nation such as the USA. The six questions are as follows. First, when can one justify a trade ban as an effective regulatory...

Recently, Batabyal and Yoo (2007) have proposed a new probabilistic approach to orchard management. In this approach, a manager minimizes an economic criterion function, namely, the long run expected net cost of orchard management subject to an ecological constraint which says that the...