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%...

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...

The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that,...

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...

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,...

We study a collective decision-making process in which people who are interested in an issue are invited to attend a meeting, and the policy chosen is a compromise among the preferences of those who show up. We show that in an equilibrium the number of attendees is small and their positions are...

Since management of a common property resource can only be undertaken by a government of finitely lived agents, a natural way to study common property management is to study the behavior of such governments. This paper proposes that the choice of management objective by a government of finitely...

The Toronto Land Transfer Tax, implemented nearly a year ago, has had significant negative effects on the housing market, reducing sales and lowering average house prices.