We define the irreversibility effect and demonstrate its importance in problems involving investment decisions under uncertainty. We establish several analytical and numerical results that suggest both that the effect holds more widely than generally recognized, and that an existing result...

We link farmland values to climatic, soil, and socioeconomic variables for counties east of the 100th meridian, the historic boundary of agriculture not primarily dependent on irrigation. Degree days, a non-linear transformation of the climatic variables suggested by agronomic experiments as...

The striped bass population in the San Francisco Bay/Delta estuary has been declining over the past two decades. Though the decline has been studied intensively, the causes are not completely understood. In this report we provide a review of theories about the decline, empirical evidence, and...

The problem addressed by this study is how a large urban water district can best respond to a drought or the prospect of a drought. Specifically, what is the least cost combination of alternatives to meet periodic shortages? A solution to this problem may involve structural approaches (such as...

If average costs in a nonrenewable resource industry are U-shaped, a competitive equilibrium may not be optimal and, indeed, may not exist. Although the differential equation that describes the change in the rate of extraction is the same for planner and firm, the boundary conditions obtained...

This paper develops a model of residential water demand under a nonlinear budget constraint. The theoretical model for an individual consumer is adapted to yield an aggregate model that preserves the structure of the individual demand function, and that can be used with aggregate (water district...