We study water regulation for a schematic water economy representing a wide range of real world situations. A water policy has inter- and intra-temporal components. The first determines the limits on extractions from the naturally replenished sources, given the stochastic nature of recharge...

When a nonpoint source pollution process involves many polluters, each taking his own contribution to aggregate pollution to be negligible, ambient-based policies become ineffective due to lack of strategic interactions between dischargers. We offer a regulation mechanism for this case. The...

Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

We study optimal adaptation to climate change when the harmful consequences of global warming are associated with stochastic occurrence of abrupt changes. The adaptation policy entails the accumulation of a particular sort of capital that will eliminate or reduce the catastrophic damage of an...

Exploitation diminishes the capacity of renewable resources to with-stand environmental stress, increasing their vulnerability to extreme conditions that may trigger abrupt changes. The onset of such events depends on the coincidence of extreme environmental conditions (environmental threat) and...

Regulation of nonpoint source pollution often relies in one way or another on policy instruments based on ambient indicators. For well-known reasons, enforcement of ambient-based policies is, at best, limited. If no individual choices or actions are observed, than ambient-based regulation might...