Abstract: I investigate whether uncertainty as a result of conflicts over water rights create measurable impacts on water quality. Many American Indian tribes have long-held, but unenforced and unquantified, reserved rights to water in the western United States, a region with intense water scarcity. Due to over-allocation of water resources over the last century, tribes must engage in lengthy legal processes in order to protect and re-distribute water that was judicially secured but not practically implemented. I create the first granular spatial dataset connecting and networking millions of water-quality readings over time with with official start and end dates for tribal water-rights adjudications in order to investigate the impact of these procedures on water quality. I find causal evidence that water pollution worsens during these processes, especiallyupstream of and close to reservations. The worsening stops once rights are settled and uncertainty is resolved.
Risky Business: Preferences for Risk and Uncertainty in Water Markets
This is a working project on understanding water-rights trading markets. Despite water being essential for life itself in all facets, we know very little about it as an economic resource, including what its "market" price is, or even its true accessibility and availability over time. Due to institutional and legal forces, and physical and technological constraints, it is exceedingly difficult to analyze entities and individuals who trade water rights. Yet water markets affect how we use this resource, and how users may be able to adapt to climate change, scarcity, or policy relating to water management.
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I analyze 10 years of transactions across 12 markets in six states to understand and estimate attitudes towards risk, how buyers and sellers perceive risk and scarcity in conjunction with shifting policy regimes and environmental characteristics, and price these beliefs into the market.
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Considerations for Federal and State Landback, with Miriam Jorgensen
Policy Brief - Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development
https://indigenousgov.hks.harvard.edu/publications/considerations-federal-and-state-landback
Recognizing Rights in the Era of Appropriation: Understanding the Institutional Underpinnings and Evolving Legal Framework of U.S. Federal Indian Land Policies
[Book chapter in the forthcoming Festschrift in Honor of Joe Kalt and Steve Cornell, edited by Miriam Jorgensen and Wayne Ducheneaux]
Abstract: The U.S. government routinely used legal mechanisms to usurp U.S.-sanctioned property rights for Indian nations over the course of American history. Policies were explicitly introduced to disenfranchise tribes, eradicate governance structures on tribal nations, and transfer land and resources away from tribes. These policies worked to an extent – since colonization tribes have found themselves in a complicated maze of changing property rights as they relate to tribal and trust land. Nonetheless, as the era of self-determination has evolved, tribes have been able to strategically interface with U.S. institutions of their choosing, in order to further aims designated by their own nations. This chapter focuses on the evolution of property rights in the context of U.S.-tribal relations, and the institutional framework that engendered the system of appropriation that played out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the American west. I also present summary findings relating to American Indian reservation land loss during U.S. western settlement, indicating the importance of geologic and natural resources, but also of socio-economic factors in terms of the pattern of land loss.
