Where's Coase?

Gary Libecap is Distinguished Professor in the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Economics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Libecap was Pitt Professor in Economics at the University of Cambridge, 2010–2011 and Erskine Professor at the University of Canterbury (NZ), 2019. He has long worked on the development and impact of property rights institutions, particularly for natural resources: oil and gas, timber, rangeland, minerals, water, and fisheries. He has authored or coauthored 14 books and over 100 peer reviewed articles and chapters. He was awarded the Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.

• 1. The implications of economic property rights or rent-seeking in forming institutions; 2. Economic property rights and markets or rent-seeking: arguments in the institutional economics literature; 3. Economic property rights: adoption worldwide and in US environmental and natural resource policy; 4. Rent-seeking in the provision of a public good: The Clean Air Act; 5. Rent-seeking, economic property rights, and Coasean trade: US fisheries regulation; 6. Rent-seeking in protecting at-risk species: The Endangered Species Act; 7. What have we learned from the absence of Coase? Implications for the formation of institutions.