The passage of landmark government regulation is often the culmination of evolving social pressure and incremental policy change. During this process, firms may preemptively adjust behavior in anticipation of impending regulation, making it difficult to quantify the overall economic impact of...

This paper relates the story of the massive milk smuggling that occurred in Pennsylvania border towns during the 1950s and 1960s, and reports on more recent smuggling that occurred between Hong Kong and mainland China

This paper explores how the rights of nature could be protected through legislation in British Columbia (BC). Canada is far behind other countries in protecting rights of nature. Canadian law does not currently recognize the rights of nature in any meaningful way. Numerous statutes in Canada...

The public trust doctrine is an ancient doctrine of public property law that governs sovereign stewardship of natural resources. The doctrine both promote public access to trust resources and requires sovereign protection of them for the benefit of the public, including future generations. The...

Production of high volumes of flowback and produced water (FPW) from hydraulic fracturing (HF) is among the environmental concerns associated with hydrocarbon recovery from unconventional low-permeability formations. FPW management costs are a key factor for oil and gas companies in deciding the...

Air pollution was severe in many urban areas of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, in part due to the burning of bituminous coal for heat. We estimate the effects of this bituminous coal consumption on mortality rates in the U.S. during the mid-20th century. Coal...

Tile drainage was first demonstrated in the United States in 1835 as a method to adapt agriculture to excessive water in soils. Subsequently, innovations in coordinated drainage enterprises, engineering, and tile manufacture led to drainage over large portions of the U.S. Midwest and Southeast....

This paper investigates how innovation responded to and shaped the economic impact of the American Dust Bowl, an environmental catastrophe that led to widespread soil erosion on the US Plains during the 1930s. Combining data on county-level erosion, the historical geography of crop production,...

This paper proposes that, when modeling for the relation between the convenience yield and current scarcity, time to maturity and time to harvest should interact with current scarcity, i.e. the two should enter multiplicatively. In implementing this idea we also compare three models for current...

Kaldor (1939) and Working (1948,1949) note that a commodity's backwardation is very much related to temporary scarcity. To them, the obvious measure of scarcity is the current level of inventories relative to a normal level. In 1987-2007 data, however, the spot price has become much more...