We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship most likely reflect a failure to properly control for the fact the individuals...

A review of the conservation biology literature reveals pervasive uncertainty about the effects of conservation policies on the persistence of populations of endangered species. This uncertainty about population persistence is of two types. Loosely speaking, certain features of the world that...

Despite their importance in economic life, meetings with costly participation are little studied. This paper is an empirical analysis of participation at public meetings. We investigate basic and previously unaddressed questions about meetings with costly participation. Who goes? Does attendance...

We estimate the effects of major roads and public transit on the growth of major cities in the US between 1980 and 2000. We find that a 10% increase in a city’s stock of roads causes about a 2% increase in its population and employment and a small decrease in its share of poor households over...

There is empirical and theoretical evidence indicating that quota-induced highgrading is aproblem in weight-based ITQ programs. This paper examines value-based ITQ programs as apossible solution to this problem. It is shown that value-based ITQ programs do not provide anincentive to highgrade,...

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...

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that,...