James P. Quirk

Water Law, Water Transfers, and Economic Efficiency: The Colorado River

The Colorado River illustrates that inefficient water allocation in the form of restricted transfer rights can give a false impression of water shortages. Transfer obstructions at the Federal, interstate, and intrastate levels include the prior-appropriation doctrine and return-flow externalities. Water allocation can be made more efficient by introducing competitive markets and reducing the amount allotted to agriculture. This would provide incentives to improve irrigation practices and free up as much as 10% of Colorado River water for other uses. 32 references. (DCK)

Economic aspects of appropriative water rights

Abstract In the and portion of the western U.S., economic development has been affected by the doctrine of appropriative water rights. This paper considers the efficiency aspects of the appropriative doctrine for the case of a stochastic and uncontrolled river, then, subsequently, extends the analysis to the case where the presence of an upstream storage facility provides some degree of flexibility in determining releases. Lastly, the effects of institutions which limit the degree of river use and the implicit release policies attendant are considered.

A CLASS OF GENERALIZED METZLERIAN MATRICES

This paper returns to a problem concerning the relationship between dynamic stability and Hicksian stability raised in a paper by Lloyd Metzler over twenty-five years ago [10]. The present paper identifies-a class of matrices which has the property that dynamic stability implies Hicksian stability, as in the gross substitute or “Metzlerian” case. Further, as in the Metzlerian case, such matrices are specified in terms of their qualitative properties, i.e., their sign pattern configurations. Some links between this class of matrices and Samuelson’s correspondence principle are also indicated.