We study the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and consider what determines differences in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data to track the evolution of land use on a grid of 8.7 billion 30x30 metre cells, we measure sprawl as the amount of undeveloped land surrounding...

Individual quota (IQ) programs are a promising and increasingly common means of regulating fisheries. This paper examines how profit maximizing fishers respond to different types of IQ programs in fisheries where many types of fish are harvested simultaneously. This analysis shows that the most...

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus increases in the land area used by individual households. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.5%...

Abstract: We investigate the relationship between interstate highways and highway vehicle kilometers traveled (vkt) in us cities. We find that vkt increases proportionately to highways and identify three important sources for this extra vkt: an increase in driving by current residents; an...

This paper considers the design of individual quota programs for fisheries where more than one market class of fish is harvested and where a manager is uncertain about the fishing technology, prices, stock levels, and compliance. In particular, the paper considers three problems that follow from...

We study the relationship between urban sprawl and obesity. Using data that tracks individuals over time, we find no evidence that urban sprawl causes obesity. We show that previous findings of a positive relationship most likely reflect a failure to properly control for the fact the individuals...

A review of the conservation biology literature reveals pervasive uncertainty about the effects of conservation policies on the persistence of populations of endangered species. This uncertainty about population persistence is of two types. Loosely speaking, certain features of the world that...

Despite their importance in economic life, meetings with costly participation are little studied. This paper is an empirical analysis of participation at public meetings. We investigate basic and previously unaddressed questions about meetings with costly participation. Who goes? Does attendance...

We estimate the effects of major roads and public transit on the growth of major cities in the US between 1980 and 2000. We find that a 10% increase in a city’s stock of roads causes about a 2% increase in its population and employment and a small decrease in its share of poor households over...

There is empirical and theoretical evidence indicating that quota-induced highgrading is aproblem in weight-based ITQ programs. This paper examines value-based ITQ programs as apossible solution to this problem. It is shown that value-based ITQ programs do not provide anincentive to highgrade,...