The institutional economics if John Commons (1934) contained two related objectives. The first was to explain the evolution of economics. The second was to analyze the effects of institutions on resource allocation and the distribution of income. The method of explaining the evolution of...

With the specter of climate change, groundwater scarcity looms as an increasingly critical issue worldwide. Minimizing the adverse effects of scarcity requires optimal as well as sustainable patterns of groundwater management. We review the many sustainable paths for groundwater extraction from...

This essay explores the nature, causes, and consequences of corruption as it pertains to entire regimes. Grand corruption is modeled as a type of unproductive rent-seeking at the highest levels of government. The economic costs of corruption are assumed to increase in the decentralization (and...

This paper examines the sequence of optimal extraction of nonrenewable resources in the presence of multiple demands. We provide conditions under which extraction of a nonrenewable resource may be discontinuous over the course of its depletion.

Once established, invasive species can rapidly and irreversibly alter ecosystems and degrade the value of ecosystem services. Optimal control of an exotic pest solves for a trajectory of removals that minimizes the present value of removal costs and residual damages from the remaining pest...

The one-demand Hotelling model fails to explain the observed specialization of nonrenewable resources. We develop a model with multiple demands and resources to show that specialization of resources according to demand is driven by Ricardian comparative advantage while the order of resource use...

This paper develops a two-stage model for the optimal management of a potential invasive species. The arrival of an invasive species is modeled as an irreversible event with an uncertain arrival time. The model is solved in two stages, beginning with the post-invasion stage. In this stage, we...

It is the charge of economic history not only to explain the economic past, but to use it to enrich and develop economic theory (North, 1994). In paleoeconomics, theory plays the additional role of adding veracity of accounts based on sparse evidence through the demonstration of internal...