This article examines the economic impacts of policy alternatives for addressing allocative inefficiencies among agricultural, urban, and environmental uses of federal water. The Central Valley Project Improvement Act, composed of multiple incentive-based and command-and-control policies, forms...

We analyse agreements on river water allocation between riparian countries. Besides being efficient, water allocation agreements need to be stable in order to be effective in increasing the efficiency of water use. In this paper, we assess the stability of water allocation agreements, using a...

Water resources are facing several stresses in terms of quantity and quality. These pressures are closely related to the human interventions in fields like: agriculture, land-use/land use change, construction/management of reservoirs, pollutant emissions, and water /wastewater treatment, among...

One key water resource challenge that faces the eastern United States today is how to regulate water withdrawals by offstream users, while preserving the fair sharing philosophy of the common-law Riparian Doctrine. Traditionally, this doctrine requires that riparians (users owning land adjacent...

In this paper we consider the problem of sharing water from a river among a group of agents (countries, cities, firms) located along the river. The benefit of each agent depends on the amount of water consumed by the agent. An allocation of the water among the agents is efficient when it...

We consider the problem of sharing water among agents located along a river. Each agent has quasi-linear preferences over river water and money, where the benefit of consuming an amount of water is given by a continuous and concave benefit function. A solution to the problem efficiently...

Many water allocation agreements in transboundary river basins are inherently unstable. Due to stochastic river flow, agreements may be broken in case of drought. The objective of this paper is to analyze whether water allocation agreements can be self-enforcing, or sustainable. We do so using...

In a river claims problem, agents are ordered linearly, and they have both an initial water endowment as well as a claim to the total water resource. We provide characterizations of two solutions to this problem, using Composition properties which have particularly relevant interpretations for...

The Physical Externality Model is used to illustrate the potential limitations of blindly adopting formal models for economic investigation and explanation in varied geographical contexts. As argued by institutional economists for the last hundred years the practice limits the value and...

Traditional approaches to estimating the potential benefits of water reform, including the introduction of water markets, have relied on short-run models which assume irrigation capital is either fixed or not a constraint on decision making. Other studies have incorporated a long-run decision...