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...

American Indian reservations are islands of poverty in a sea of wealth. Because this poverty cannot be explained solely by natural resource, physical, and human capital constraints, institutions are likely to be part of the explanation. One of the institutional variables is the sovereign power...

At the core of environmental economics is the potential for a divergence between private and social costs (based on the work of A. C. Pigou) and the potential for private contracts to shrink this divergence (based on the work of Ronald Coase). A close examination of Pigou and Coase reveals that...