Property rights are commonly touted as a solution to common pool resource problems. But in practice the security of these property rights varies substantially owing to differences in design. In fisheries, the design of individual transferable quotas (ITQs) varies widely; the consequences of...

We analyze a policy experiment in an Alaskan commercial fishery that assigned a portion of an overall catch quota to a voluntary cooperative, with the remainder exploited competitively by those choosing to fish independently. Unlike the individual quota system advocated by many economists, the...

Spatial connectivity of renewable resources induces a spatial externality in extraction. We explore the consequences of decentralized spatial property rights in the presence of spatial externalities. We generalize the notion of unitization - developed to enhance cooperative extraction of oil and...

Managing natural resources under large-scale environmental fluctuations like the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is likely to become increasingly important under climate change. Forecasts of environmental conditions are improving, but the best response to an unfavorable forecast remains...

Natural resources such as carbon, water, and fish are increasingly managed with markets that require an initial allocation of property rights. In practice these rights are typically grandfathered based on historical use, but rights could be allocated any number of ways. Taking the perspective of...

We study the timing-of-extraction problem facing a decentralized mine owner when extraction entails environmental damage. As expected, when the environmental damage from mining is known, the socially optimal timing will depend on the magnitude of the damage relative to these costs in the rest of...

The hedonic pricing method is one of the fundamental approaches used to estimate the economic value of attributes that affect the market price of an asset. In environmental economics, such methods are routinely used to derive the economic valuation of environmental attributes such as air...

Marine reserves are an effective tool for protecting biodiversity locally, with potential economic benefits including enhancement of local fisheries, increased tourism, and maintenance of ecosystem services. However, fishing communities often fear short-term income losses associated with...

We examine the interplay between environmental policy instrument choice (i.e., prices vs. quantities) and private provision of public goods, which in this context we denote "Coasean provision." Coasean provision captures private provision of environmental public goods due to consumer preferences...

Despite recent improvements in the ecological status of wild-capture fisheries, a significant share (33%) of global marine stocks remains overexploited. While top-down management has been shown to work in many settings, there is growing interest in demand-side interventions, which work through...