Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/11.

Many rural landowners within the Western United States do not have access to a secure water supply provided by a major dam or an irrigation district. Such water users must rely instead on groundwater pumping and/or seasonal water flows from tributaries. Some of these agricultural producers...

Funds available to purchase land and easements for conservation purposes are limited. This article provides a targeting strategy for protecting multiple environmental benefits that includes heterogeneity in land costs and probability of land-use conversion, by incorporating spatially explicit...

In the standard economic model of cap and trade policies, the regulator is assumed to place zero value on pollution reductions below the cap. This paper considers an alternative case, where the policy makers can manipulate the rules of the program to achieve improved environmental performance....

We explore the efficiency of allowing participants in transferable-rights programs to sell credits in multiple markets, i.e., to double dip. In a first-best economy double-dipping is efficient, but if the cap is set suboptimally, then the answer depends on the relative slopes of the marginal...

There is rapidly growing interest in the use of market-based (MB) instruments in environmental policy. The papers in this session discuss three relatively new areas for such policies: groundwater contamination, nonpoint source surface-water pollution and carbon sequestration. The papers point...

Legal issues in environmental policy are considered, as well as property rights and voluntary regulations. Taxation, Fines, and Producer Liability Rules: Efficiency and Market Structure Implications Stephen Hamilton, Kansas State University. Regulatory Takings and the Diminution of Value: A...

In the standard economic model of cap and trade policies, the regulator is assumed to place zero value on pollution reductions below the cap. This paper considers an alternative case, where the policy makers can manipulate the rules of the program to achieve improved environmental performance....