Although millions of hectares of public land are transferred to private parties each year, often with unsatisfactory results, evidence on mechanisms to achieve better outcomes is scant. This paper analyzes the impact of a 2021 reform in Ukraine that -after earlier digitization efforts did not...

This Article reflects upon Professor John Copeland Nagle’s scholarship on public land with an emphasis on how his work might extend to the issue of accessibility. Professor John Copeland Nagle was a talented yet humble man of deep kindness and religious convictions. In addition to being a...

This paper analyzes the effect of public land on local economies in the western United States. In large part, the current distribution of western public lands is the result of federal land disposal policies of the 19th century. This historical context is important for two reasons. First, it...

How does the enforcement of property rights affects land accumulation by landed elites? Using a unique classification of the local agricultural workforce and a differencein- difference framework I show how landed elites, relative to landless peasants, benefited from Colombian land reform during...

This essay explores the legal implications of decisions by local governments to limit access to federal public lands within their boundaries (such as national forests and BLM lands) during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Some local governments utilized indirect and legally...

Outdoor recreation is assuming a prominent role across the public lands, presenting the responsible federal agencies with difficult, new management challenges. Since World War II, recreational uses of public lands have been on a steady upward trajectory, which has only accelerated during this...

Solar power is now economically competitive with fossil fuels in many countries, yet relatively few homeowners have installed solar panels on their property. A principal reason for this behavior stems from cognitive biases—such as myopia, inertia and herding—that cause consumers to avoid...

The United States deed recording system alters the “first in time, first in right” doctrine to enable good faith purchasers to record their deeds to protect themselves against prior unrecorded conveyances, and to provide constructive notice of their interests to potential subsequent...

This 263-page book is fascinating not only for its vivid account of the history of the American West but also for its economic analysis of the spontaneous emergence of property rights. In Hollywood movies, the center stage belongs to gunslingers who profit through violence. In The Not So Wild,...

Solar power is now economically competitive with fossil fuels in many countries, yet relatively few homeowners have installed solar panels on their property. A principal reason for this behavior stems from cognitive biases--such as myopia, inertia and herding--that cause consumers to avoid...

The public land use planning process is broken. The land use plans of the principal multiple use agencies – the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – are unnecessarily complex, take too long to complete, monopolize the time and resources of public land management agency...

This essay examines changes in policies regarding coal extraction from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration. Donald Trump campaigned on promotion of coal and extractive industries, and one of the ways he is trying to help those industries is by increasing the amount of land...

The United States has made a remarkable commitment to nature conservation on the federal public lands. The country's existing array of national parks, wilderness areas, national monuments, wildlife refuges, and other protective designations encompasses roughly 150 million acres, or nearly 40...

How do commodity shocks impact the privatization of public lands? This paper examines this question through the lens of the establishment of private property rights over public lands in Colombia, which has had one of the Western Hemisphere's largest public land distribution programs during the...

Pursuant to several statutes, the Department of the Interior (“Interior”) is tasked with managing the nation's mineral resources under the principles of “multiple use” and “sustained yield” and must earn “fair market value” for the use of federal lands and their resources. In...

For centuries, many governments in the Asia-Pacific region have owned all the land resources, and government land auctions were deployed as an essential channel to supply public land. While the government-led approach to land supply is often criticized for lacking sensitivity to changing market...

Resentment of the federal government's management of public lands runs deep in the arid West, where grazing, mining, and timber once predominated and remain important to rural communities. This resentment bubbled over in 2016 with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in...

This article applies public choice political theory to public lands decisionmaking and concludes that it explains why multiple-use management, the paradigm for most federal public lands, consistently overemphasizes commodity production at the expense of other values like watershed protection and...

This paper pilots an approach to identifying, categorizing, and mapping public land owned by the central, state, and local government in urban developed areas of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. The methodology uses information on plot sizes, location, and ownership that is publicly available for all...

This White Paper is the fourth in a series addressing state efforts to take over federally managed public lands. We argue here that state time and resources would be better spent on collaborative efforts to improve resource management practices. Alternatives to litigation, like that threatened...

This article examines how federal agencies and local governments are collaborating in land use planning, with a particular focus on the West. Part I provides a brief overview of local government planning as well as the overarching National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) requirements that...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of Carbon Footprint indicator applied to the public building of the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw. Analysis takes into account direct and indirect CO2 emissions related to the functioning of the Faculty. Analysis concentrates on the...

The federal government has endorsed more extensive use of the federal public lands for the production of solar power, both to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and to bolster the security of domestic energy supplies. Spurred by grant money made available under...

The federal government controls far more offshore public lands - the Outer Continental Shelf - than it controls terrestrial lands, but the oceans have been bereft of the kind of comprehensive planning mandated for other public lands under statutes like the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act...

The paper presents an empirical analysis of Carbon Footprint indicator applied to the public building of the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Warsaw. Analysis takes into account direct and indirect CO2 emissions related to the functioning of the Faculty. Analysis concentrates on the...

This paper examines the effects of geographic portfolio concentration on the return performance of U.S. public REITs versus private commercial real estate over the 1996-2013 time period. We document significant cross-sectional and temporal differences in the geographic concentration of property...

We test whether a major earthquake in one city (Christchurch, New Zealand) affects the prices of earthquake-prone commercial buildings in a city (Wellington) that was unaffected by the disaster. In particular, we test whether the official public declaration of a building as being...

This study aims to present an efficient plan for the application of a geothermal energy facility at the building structure planning phase. Energy consumption, energy cost and the primary energy consumption of buildings were calculated to enable a comparison of buildings prior to the application...

One of the most difficult challenges facing public land managers today is how to address climate change in a meaningful way when making decisions affecting public lands. This problem is largely the product of the high levels of uncertainty surrounding climate change and the potential...

George W. Bush ran for president as an advocate of a "cowboy capitalist" ideology of low taxes, deregulation, free markets, and free trade. The ranching industry that produced the cowboy, however, has long had a heavy dose of government planning and welfare state subsidies, especially in public...