Resources are often allocated without property rights and the attendant market exchanges. Households commonly encounter these situations—access to schools, on-street parking. Fishing firms typically exploit stocks in a limited-entry setting under input controls. Absent transferable rights and...

This article studies how rent-seeking behavior induces an informal leasing market for fishing licenses that leads harvesters in a common pool to circumvent rules set by the manager to conserve the resource, as well as how the vulnerability of the resource to such behavior depends on the...

Taking advantage of randomly-assigned federal mineral rights, the first essay establishes the discount that mineral developers place on oil and gas leases with divided ownership. This discount is interpreted as an expectation of reduced profits as a result of transaction costs incurred in...

The formation of harvest cooperatives has recently generated considerable interest among fishermen and regulators as an alternative to other rights-based systems such as individual transferable quotas. Many consider the promotion of self-governance to be essential to more sustainable, equitable...