We study how the strength of property rights to individual extractive firms affects a regulator's choice over exploitation rates for a natural resource. The regulator is modeled as an intermediary between current and future resource harvesters, rather than between producers and consumers, as in...

Widespread global collapses of fisheries corroborate decades-old predictions by economists, made long before large-scale industrialization of the world's fisheries, that open access would have deleterious ecological and economic effects on fishery resources. Incentive-based alternatives...

We propose enforcement strategies for emissions trading programs with bankable emissions permits that guarantee complete compliance with minimal enforcement costs. Our strategies emphasize imperfect monitoring supported by a high unit penalty for reporting violations, and tying this penalty...

The removal of invasive species is the first step toward restoring an ecosystem following invasion. We develop spatially-explicit, dynamic optimal control strategies for a large class of invasion problems using linear-quadratic control. This approach allows us to produce new insights that help...

We analyze a seldom used, but highly promising form of rights-based management over common pool resources that involves the self-selection of heterogeneous fishermen into sectors. The fishery management regime assigns one portion of an overall catch quota to a voluntary cooperative, with the...

One of the most controversial aspects of federal and state policies aimed at protecting old-growth ecosystems has been the potential impact of job losses on local economies. A fundamental question for historically timber-dependent communities is whether these policies will result in local...