Do Environmental Markets Improve on Open Access? Evidence from California Groundwater Rights
环境市场能否优于开放取用？来自加州地下水权的证据
Environmental markets are widely prescribed as an alternative to open access regimes for natural resources. We develop a model of dynamic groundwater extraction to demonstrate how a spatial regression discontinuity design that exploits a spatially incomplete market for groundwater rights recovers a lower bound on the market’s net benefit. We apply this estimator to a major aquifer in water-scarce southern California and find that a groundwater market generated substantial…