Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such contexts many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

When confronted with market weaknesses and failures determining sustainability problems for environmental common-pool resources, economic analysis has proposed government intervention as the only alternative available. Elinor Ostrom showed that this dichotomy between market and government is not...

This paper explores the impact of airport noise regulation on airline service quality and airfares. It also characterizes the socially optimal stringency of noise limits, taking both noise damage and the various costs borne by airlines and their passengers into account. The analysis also...

We incorporate a renewable resource into an overlapping generations model with standard, well-behaved utility and constant returns to scale production functions. Besides being a factor of production the resource serves as a store of value. We characterize dynamics, efficiency and stability of...

We examine international cooperation on technological development as a supplement to, or an alternative to, international cooperation on emission reductions. R&D should be increased beyond the non-cooperative level if (i) the technology level in one country is positively affected by R&D in other...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Recent contributions have questioned whether biofuels policies actually lead to emissions reductions, and thus lower climate costs. In this paper we make two contributions to the literature. First, we study the market effects of a renewable fuel standard. Opposed to most previous studies we...

In this paper we investigate optimal harvesting of a renewable natural resource. While in the standard approach the resource is located at a single point in space we allow for the resource to be distributed over the plane. Consequently, an agent who exploits the resource has to travel from one...