A graph of environmental degradation versus income often has an inverted-U shape. Some policy analysts hypothesize that there is a causal relationship between income and environmental degradation, yielding this shape and suggesting that the solution to environmental problems is to alleviate...

Iraq’s recent service contracts with international oil companies, known as technical service contracts (TSC), exemplify the increasing reliance of oil producing countries on service contracts. In this study, we examine the economic efficiency of Iraq’s Rumaila producing field technical...

The management of groundwater resources for use in agriculture is an issue that reaches far and wide; many of the world's most productive agricultural basins depend on groundwater and have experienced declines in water table levels. There is a socially optimal rate of extraction that can be...

This paper examines the optimality of regulatory delegation when neither output levels nor effort levels are contractible. The key trade-off is that while the federal government is able to internalize externalities, the state governments have preferences that are better aligned with local...

In 1997, the United States National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for ozone was revised from a 1-h average of 0.12 parts per million (ppm) to an 8-h average of 0.08 ppm. Analysis of ozone data for the ensemble of the contiguous United States and for the period 1980-1998 show that the...

The long-term trend of background O3 in surface air over the United States from 1980 to 1998 is examined using monthly probability distributions of daily maximum 8-hour average O3 concentrations at a large ensemble of rural sites. Ozone concentrations have decreased at the high end of the...

This paper uses data on world oil price and consumption to calibrate a Hotelling model of optimal resource extraction with unlimited potential reserves when costs exhibit stock effects. Numerical solutions are generated for various specifications of the elasticity of demand for both isoelastic...

This paper examines whether economic or environmental instability affects fertility. My identification strategy uses regional data to exploit the natural variation within each of the two countries I examine: one European country - Italy - and one Asian country - Japan. I use the variance of the...

This paper examines the optimality of environmental regulatory delegation when neither output levels nor effort levels are contractible. The key trade-off is that while the federal government is able to internalize externalities, the state governments have preferences that are better aligned...

Ethanol has attracted considerable policy attention both for its use as a gasoline substitute, and as a way to enhance profits in rural areas. In this paper, we analyze the effects of government policy on the decisions of ethanol-producing firms to invest in building new ethanol plants in the...