Property rights will be more carefully defined and enforced when the value of a resource rises or the probability of losing the resource increases. A simple model is estimated on litigation data for Colorado to test this hypothesis. According to the model, the number of water rights cases will...

The study employs quarterly data from 1958:I to 2010:IV to analyze how state earnings respond to oil price changes. We allow for asymmetric and nonlinear reactions of state earnings through a smooth regime switching model. Fourteen of the 50 states are best modeled with a two regime model. The...