Invasive species change ecosystems and the economic services such ecosystems provide. Optimal policy will minimize the expected damages and costs of prevention and control. We seek to explain policy outcomes as a function of biological and economic factors, using the case of Hawaii to...

An emerging problem for environmental policy is how to design efficient strategies for the prevention and control of invasive species. However, the literature has mostly focused either on pre-introduction prevention or post-introduction control of an invasive. The benefits of prevention cannot...

Many places, including the island of Oahu in Hawaii, have a number of groundwater aquifers. Consumers located in one aquifer area can be supplied from water extracted and transported from another aquifer if this results in cost savings over local extraction. Incorporating such interdistrict...

Proposals for marginal cost water pricing have often been found to be politically infeasible because current users will have to pay a higher price even though future users will be better off. We show how efficiency pricing can be rendered Pareto-improving, and thus politically feasible, by...

Conserving the watershed can help to preserve the groundwater supplies by avoiding loss of recharge. Preventing overuse of available water through pricing reforms can also substantially increase benefits from groundwater stock. Since efficiency prices are generally higher than the inefficient,...

Several studies have documented that intertemporal water allocation in Hawaii (as elsewhere) is inefficient (see e.g., Moncur et. al., 1998). The result is widely expected to be early depletion of groundwater resources and the resulting need for using expensive and exotic technologies such as...

Several authors have argued that the second-best environmental tax on a "dirty good" is less than the marginal emission damage associated with its consumption. These studies limit their analysis to cases in which emissions can only be reduced by a proportional reduction of the "dirty" good. With...

Several authors have argued that the second-best environmental tax on a “dirty good” is less than marginal emission damage associated with its consumption. These studies limit their analysis to cases in which emissions can only be reduced by a reduction of the dirty good. With a more general...

We model welfare gains from efficient allocation of groundwater over space and time relative to the status quo policy of financial cost recovery. In order to promote political feasibility, an intertemporal compensation plan is devised that renders the reform Pareto-improving. Gainers from the...