Water scarcity turns into shortage when water supplies are mismatched with user demands. After clarifying the different social and private uses of water, I explain how to use prices to allocate treated (``utility'') water among municipal and industrial users and untreated (``raw'') water among...

This paper examines the relations between tariffs and sustainability, efficiency and equity, using a unique data-set for 308 cities in 102 countries. Higher water tariffs are correlated with lower per capita consumption, smaller local populations, lower water availability, higher demand and a...

We discuss the impact of corruption as a contributing factor to "land grabs" in SSA and examine land grab deals by country pairs to identify which deals may be grabs and which may be normal FDI. Most deals are made by corrupt selling countries but buying countries vary in their corruption,...

A monopolistic urban water supplier may succeed or fail in providing good service to its captive customers. Regulators can use benchmarks to rank performance and create virtual competition, but quantified outputs are imperfectly correlated with outcomes that matter to customers. Even worse,...

Each year, about 2.8 million people die due to problems with poor water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Over three-quarters of the dead are children. Some argue that a human right to clean water would improve this situation. This paper shows that human rights are not sufficient to improve access...

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement in equilibrium. Besides the benefit of speed, this mechanism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their...

[PhD Dissertation] The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET), a cooperative of retail and wholesale water utilities, serves 18 million people. This case study explains how MET - as a cooperative - is inefficient and how its member agencies suffer from this inefficiency. I show...

We test the impact of explicit information on individual decisions in a public goods game experiment. In the Implicit (control) condition, participants make their decisions after seeing total contributions and their own contributions. In the Explicit (treatment) condition, a different set of...

A novel version of a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism game tests how player cooperation responds to changes in incentives, i.e., payoffs that depend on performance relative to different reference groups. Cooperation is greatest when players are competing against players in other four-person...

We recommend that an auction market replace the current system for submitting academic papers and show a strict Pareto-improvement in equilibrium. Besides the benefit of speed, this mechanism increases the average quality of articles and journals and rewards editors and referees for their...