Mention of the American West usually evokes images of rough and tumble cowboys, ranchers, and outlaws. In contrast, The Not So Wild, Wild West casts America's frontier history in a new framework that emphasizes the creation of institutions, both formal and informal, that facilitated cooperation...

Front Cover -- Book Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Foreword -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction to the Hoover Classics Edition -- 1. What Are Property Rights? -- 2. What Do Property Rights Do? -- 3. Where Do Property Rights Come From? -- 4. How Secure Are Property Rights? -- 5. Will Property...

Economic analysis of natural resource and environmental issues inappropriately places too much emphasis on Pigouvian externalities and too little on Coasean property rights and transaction costs. The crucial questions are who has what property rights and what are the transaction costs associated...

In the move to adopt rights based arrangements for renewable resources to avoid the losses of open access and the inefficiencies of prescriptive regulation, we argue that grandfathering the allotments of local users can be the most efficient distribution mechanism. We differ from the standard...