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Gary Libecap

Gary Libecap is professor of Corporate Environmental Management at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Barbara. He also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. His research focuses on how or under what circumstances property rights to natural and environmental resources can be defined and enforced to address the problems of open access, and how or when markets might be developed as options for more-effective resource management and allocation. He examines the bargaining and transaction costs involved in collective action to establish property institutions

and markets. His work encompasses economics and law,economic history, natural resource economics, and economic geography. Libecap has authored or coauthored more than 200 scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in academic volumes, and research reports. His series, Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Growth, has twenty-two volumes; he served as editor of the series from 1985 to 2011. His latest books are Owens Valley Revisited: A Reassessment of the West’s First Great Water Transfer, The Economics of Climate Change: Adaptations Past and Present, coedited with Richard Steckel, and Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach, with Terry L. Anderson. His Ph.D. in economics is from the University of Pennsylvania.

Shopping for Water

How the Market Can Mitigate Water Shortages in the American West

The American West has a long tradition of conflict over water. But after fifteen years of drought across the region, it is no longer simply conflict: it is crisis.