Standard economic models of groundwater management impose restrictive assumptions regarding perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, observability of individual extraction rates, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we...

Standard economic models of groundwater management assume perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we develop a model relaxing these assumptions. Although our model generalizes to an...

We engage in a critical assessment of the neo-malthusian claim that climatic changes can be an important source of international tensions, in the extreme even militarized interstate disputes. The most likely scenario is conflict over water allocation in international catchments shared by poorer,...

This paper analyzes the problem faced by a border protection agency if endogenous exporter abatement activities affect invasive species risk, allowing for unobservable differences in abatement cost. We show how the optimal inspection/penalty regime differs from the symmetric information case....

Understanding why farmers over-apply fertilizer is essential to designing effective agro-environmental policy. If farmers are simply inefficient, possibilities exist for simultaneously improving farm profits and the environment. If not, costly trade-offs are necessary. This article examines why...

A key obstacle to practical application of mechanism design theory to regulation is the difficulty of obtaining consistent beliefs regarding information that theoretical models assume to be commonly held. This article presents a solution to this problem by developing an easily implemented...

Economists have long been interested in measuring distributional impacts of policy interventions. As environmental justice (EJ) emerged as an ethical issue in the 1970s, the academic literature has provided statistical analyses of the incidence and causes of various environmental outcomes as...