Sustainability and efficiency are potentially conflicting social objectives in natural resource management. We propose a market mechanism to allocate use rights over a stochastic resource to private managers. The mechanism endogenously determines the maximal tenure length guaranteeing that the...

We perform a model analysis to study the origins of limited resilience in ecological-economic systems. We demonstrate that the resilience properties of the ecosystem are essentially determined by the management institutions and consumers' preferences for ecosystem services. In particular, we...

Renewable resources can provide society with (i) resource rent, (ii) consumer surplus and (iii) worker surplus in resource harvesting. In a dynamic analysis we show that privatization increases the present values of consumer surplus and worker surplus if harvesting costs do not depend on the...

As growing attention is paid to climate change adaptation as an actual policy issue, the significant meaning of climate variability in adaptation decisions is beginning to be recognized. By using a real option framework, we shed light on how climate change and climate variability affect...

Renewable resources provide society with resource rent and surpluses for resource users (the processing industry, consumers) and owners of production factors (capital and labor employed in resource harvesting). We show that resource users and factor owners may favor inefficiently high harvest...

We study how income inequality affects the social value of a dynamic public good, such as natural capital. Our theory shows that both intra- and intertemporal inequality affect the social value of public natural capital. The direction and size of the effects are driven by the degree of...