We study a collective decision-making process in which people who are interested in an issue are invited to attend a meeting, and the policy chosen is a compromise among the preferences of those who show up. We show that in an equilibrium the number of attendees is small and their positions are...

Since management of a common property resource can only be undertaken by a government of finitely lived agents, a natural way to study common property management is to study the behavior of such governments. This paper proposes that the choice of management objective by a government of finitely...

Secure land tenure is important to the development process, but China’s rural reforms have so far failed to provide farm households with this security. We examine the political economy of land tenure and find that local governments sacrifice tenure security in the interests of efficiency and...

This paper considers the choice among three different types of individual quota programs in a multi-product fishery when technology, prices, and compliance are all uncertain: (1) Aggregated quota, which regulates the total weight of all species; (2) Disaggregated quota, which regulates the...

Abstract: We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometers traveled (vkt) in us cities. We find that vkt increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra vkt: an increase in driving by current residents; an...

We study the extent to which U. S. urban development is sprawling and what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30 × 30 meter cells, we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an...