A Century of Environmental Legislation

Louis P. Cain and Brooks Kaiser
Additional contact information
Louis P. Cain: Loyola University Chicago and Northwestern University

No 118/15, Working Papers from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics

Abstract: We find three intertwined ambitions that drove federal legislation over wildlife and biodiversity at the beginning of the 20th Century: establishment of multiple-use federal lands, the economic development of natural resources, and the maintenance of option values. We examine this federal intervention in natural resource use by analyzing roll-call votes over the past century. These votes involved decisions regarding public land that reallocated the returns to users by changing the asset’s physical character or its usage rights. We suggest that long term consequences affecting current resource allocations arose from disparities between broadly dispersed benefits and locally concentrated socio-economic and geo-physical (spatial) costs. We show that a primary intent of public land management has become to preserve multiple-use option values and identify important factors in computing those option values. We do this by demonstrating how the willingness to forego current benefits for future ones depends on the community’s resource endowments. These endowments are defined not only in terms of users’ current wealth accumulation but also from their expected ability to extract utility from natural resources over time.

Keywords: Environmental Legislation; Wildlife Legislation; Endangered Species Act; Lacey Act; Economic History of the Environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N51 N52 Q23 Q24 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 62 pages
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env, nep-his and nep-law
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sdu.dk/~/media/Files/Om_SDU/Institutter/Miljo/ime/wp/kaiser118.ashx First version, 2014-03 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.sdu.dk:80 (A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)

Related works:
Chapter: A Century of Environmental Legislation (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sdk:wpaper:118

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ulla H. Oehlenschläger ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).