We examine adoption of land demarcation in the British Empire during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. We develop a model and test its implications against data from temperate British colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Three arrangements were implemented:...

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the North American agricultural frontier moved for the first time into semi-arid regions where farming was vulnerable to drought. Farmers who migrated to the region had to adapt their crops, techniques, and farm sizes to better fit the environment. But...

We examine the implications of the public trust doctrine in natural resource protection and conservation. A model of litigation and settlement among disputing parties suggests that the public trust doctrine introduces more costs and is more time consuming than would be the case with alternative...