We study how the strength of property rights to individual extractive firms affects a regulator's choice over exploitation rates for a natural resource. The regulator is modeled as an intermediary between current and future resource harvesters, rather than between producers and consumers, as in...

Credit markets and property rights are fundamental for modern economies, but they also have implications for the commons. Using a dynamic model of competitive resource extraction, we show that improving property right security unambiguously increases conservation incentives, but the effect of...

Widespread global collapses of fisheries corroborate decades-old predictions by economists, made long before large-scale industrialization of the world's fisheries, that open access would have deleterious ecological and economic effects on fishery resources. Incentive-based alternatives...

Allocating inspection resources over a diverse set of imports to prevent entry of plant pests and pathogens presents a substantial policy design challenge. We model inspections of live plant imports and producer responses to inspections using a “state-dependent” monitoring and enforcement...

We compile global data to examine the current status, trends, threats, and opportunities in the world's wild-capture fisheries. We find that global fisheries have largely diverged—well-managed, often industrial fisheries tend to be in reasonably good health, while coastal fisheries, often from...