The Massachusetts Woodlands Cooperative, LLC (MWC) is working to help members conduct sustainable forestry of the highest standards while increasing financial returns from harvest activities. The forests of Massachusetts, the 3rd most densely populated of the United States, are threatened....

A popular environmental policy is to pay forest owners for avoiding deforestation on their land. This is an example of "payments for ecosystem services" (PES). This paper shows that liquidity constraints can limit the effectiveness of PES programs. If an individual would have cut down trees to...

We conduct a social dilemma experiment in which real-world leaders can punish group members as a third party. Despite facing an identical environment, leaders are found to take remarkably different punishment approaches. The different leader types revealed experimentally explain the relative...

The paper conducts an empirical investigation on the complex relationship between biodiversity and the values of ecosystem goods and services that are supported by biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, aiming to produce an econometric quantification of the magnitudes involved. Furthermore, we...

We develop a theory of resource management where the degree to which countries escape the tragedy of the commons, and hence the de facto property rights regime, is endogenously determined. Three forces determine success or failure in resource management: the regulator's enforcement power, the...

This note introduces and illustrates fCPR (Forest Conservation Performance Rating), a system of color-coded ratings for tropical forest conservation performance that can be implemented for local areas, countries, regions, and the entire pan-tropics. The ratings reward tropical forest...

In the past two decades, theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that communities of resource users are capable of overcoming social dilemmas, and are capable of creating and sustaining institutions designed to prevent degradation of common pool natural resources. However, there is...

A bidding process can be organized so that offers are submitted simultaneously or sequentially. In the latter case, potential buyers can condition their behavior on previous entrants' decisions. The relative performance of these mechanisms is investigated when entry is costly and selective,...

This paper updates Working Paper 294, “FCPR—Forest Conservation Performance Rating for the Pan-Tropics.” Forest Conservation Performance Rating (fCPR) is a system of color-coded ratings for tropical forest conservation performance that can be implemented for local areas, countries,...

We adopted the state-of-the-art methodologies to quantify the total carbon stocked by Natura 2000 habitats as well as to project the future changes of carbon stocks influenced by alternative policy options for the management of Natura 2000 habitats by 2020. Our results show that the N2K network...