Essays in resource and environmental economics (Quebec)

The four essays included consider approaches to understanding issues of importance to management and understanding of the relationships between economic activity, natural resources, and the environment.; The first applies cross-country empirical techniques to assess the separate roles of large natural resource stocks and large amounts of resource extraction activity on economic institutions that affect the establishment of reliable property rights. There is a link between resource abundance and subsequent rule of law; when abundance is controlled for, extraction activity becomes insignificant. The finding is robust to concerns about sample selection in the analysis, which are addressed using multiple imputation techniques. I present a model of a relationship between abundance, appropriative conflict, and rule of law.; The second and third essays focus on the economics of international agreements restricting use of methyl bromide, an ozone depleting substance under the Montreal Protocol. The former develops criteria for 'economic feasibility' in the context of 'Critical Use Exemptions' from restrictions on production and use of methyl bromide. Trends in abatement costs and in the willingness to pay for abatement are examined, and estimates of the burden of incidence of abatement costs under different circumstances are developed. The latter examines the costs of abatement and incidence more closely in a case study of one important exemption request, that for strawberry growers in California.; The last essay examines the 'environmental Kuznets curve,' an inverted-U relationship between environmental damage and income levels in a country. It is motivated by a discrepancy in the literature, which shows support for the EKC hypothesis in cross-country analysis but very little evidence in favor of the hypothesis in case studies. This essay separately examines the air pollution-income relationship within countries using non-parametric techniques. The large number of countries available allows consideration across countries to see if the pattern of the within-country relationships is EKC-consistent more often than would be expected under random assignment of income-pollution relationships. Support for the EKC hypothesis within the sample is confined to a small subset of the data; this agreement can be explained by a simpler hypothesis than the environmental Kuznets curve.