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Water management in California is an extremely complex issue that requires collaboration from all levels of government. As the water supply shrinks and demand pressures increase over the next century, water management will become increasingly difficult. There is no single solution to the water issues facing California but there are many incremental steps than can be taken to secure an efficient, sustainable, and environmentally friendly economy. Water conservation programs appear to be the most cost effective means of reducing water demand. This requires a combination of incentives to reduce consumption, education about the true cost of water for California, and regulatory reform to promote efficient use and distribution of water. The state needs to make investments in education about water in California for conservation measures to be successfully adopted and implemented by the general populace. From a policy perspective, higher levels of government in the state need to establish statewide performance standards for groundwater withdrawals, point and non-point pollution, flood risk, and watershed integration for local governments to enforce. In order for these changes in water policy to be implemented, strong leadership is necessary.

Thesis. 1979. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 248-258. / Ph.D.

At the end of the First World War, new states were created in the former domains of the Ottoman Empire. In the region between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Britain and France obtained through conquest and international writ new "mandate" territories in Iraq and Syria, while in 1923 a new Turkish republic was founded on the Anatolian peninsula. During the next two decades, governments in these states planned a series of water control projects on the two rivers as part of broad economic development efforts. Many of these projects were eventually constructed after the Second World War, shaping the environment of the river basin with dams, flood control and irrigation works, and hydroelectric power stations. By comparing these states' efforts to exploit natural resources and manage the environment of the basin, this study considers the environmental function in the shift from empire to independent nation-state and in the diverse processes of modern state formation. Through water resource exploitation, Iraq, Syria and Turkey founded modern bureaucracies, centralized control over natural resources, and justified new techniques to manage populations. However, the intentions of Baghdad, Ankara and Damascus, as well as the results obtained, differed in significant ways, providing insight not only into the nature of these states, but also the political dimensions of managing a critical natural resource. This dissertation is based on analysis of archival records in Arabic, English, French and Turkish, collected from institutions in England, France, the United States, India and Turkey.

This dissertation analyzes how political competition and judicial institutions shape environmental governance in democratic societies. The three chapters frame environmental problems in several different ways. In the first chapter, environmental policy is framed as an ideologically contentious public good. In the second chapter, two conceptions are juxtaposed: the environment as just another policy domain subject to political haggling, or the environment as bringing about new fundamental commitments in society, prone to becoming constitutionalized through legal deliberation. In the third chapter, the dynamic properties of technological transitions toward more sustainable modes of production are emphasized. Different types of institutions are considered in the three chapters. The first two chapters examine how political and legal processes interact. They also consider the different ways in which they channel the inputs and wishes of civil society. Chapter one is a formal model of the institution of citizen suits – a prevalent institution in environmental governance – and its interaction with the legislature. It shows that the reshaping of laws by citizens and courts after their enactment by the legislature might improve the decision process of the legislature and the public good outcomes that ensue. Chapter two is an empirical analysis of the dynamics of environmental legal rules. It uses the network of citations to legal precedent to test whether the dynamic body of law governing the environment is driven by political shifts in power or follows a process that is autonomous from these shifts in power. The results suggest that environmental law is now constitutionalized – its main principles entrenched in democratic culture rather than subject to the ebb and flow of democratic turnover of power. Chapter three also considers the dynamic aspects of governance. It uses a computational model to examine how political parties with different ideological commitments towards renewable energy might strategically use the path-dependence of technological transitions to shape policy over the long-term. It also examines how electoral pressures might constrain or help them in this endeavor.

This dissertation uses applied microeconomic tools to study three topics of fundamental importance for the regulation of the urban environment: housing, pollution, and the criminal justice system. The first chapter considers the mortgage market, and analyzes the regulatory tradeoff between optimal credit access and mortgage default. The second chapter examines the difficulties of designing environmental policy in interlinked production processes. In particular, we investigate (i) the impact of regulation on the producers of an upstream good on the pollution practices of the downstream firms that process that good and (ii) the subsequent health impacts on those who live in the cities and towns surrounding the downstream firms. The third chapter explores the bail system used for criminal defendants in the United States, and shows that the requirement that defendants post money bail has profound impacts on case outcomes. Chapter 1, "Asymmetric Information and the Link Between Leverage and Mortgage Default" begins with the observation that borrowers with large mortgages relative to their home values are more likely to default. This chapter asks whether this correlation is due to moral hazard---larger balances causing borrowers to default---or adverse selection---ex-ante risky borrowers choosing larger loans. To separate these information asymmetries, I exploit a natural experiment resulting from (i) the unique contract structure of Option Adjustable Rate Mortgages and (ii) the unexpected divergence, during the 2008 crisis, of two financial indices used to determine interest rate adjustments for these loans. I find that moral hazard is responsible for 60-70 percent of the baseline correlation between leverage and default, but adverse selection explains the remaining 30-40 percent. I construct and calibrate a simple model of mortgage choice and default with asymmetric information to highlight the policy tradeoff informed by my estimates. I show that optimal regulation of mortgage leverage must weigh losses from defaults against under-provision of credit due to adverse selection. In Chapter 2, "Interlinked Firms and the Consequences of Piecemeal Regulation", coauthored with Jonas Hjort and Gianmarco Leon, we note that industrial regulations are typically designed with a particular policy objective and set of firms in mind. Yet when input-output linkages connect firms across sectors, such ``piecemeal'' regulations may worsen externalities elsewhere in the economy. Using daily administrative and survey data, we show that in Peru's industrial fishing sector, the world's largest, air pollution from downstream (fishmeal) manufacturing plants caused 55,000 additional respiratory hospital admissions per year as a consequence of the introduction of individual property rights (over fish) upstream. By removing suppliers' incentive to ``race'' for the resource and enabling market share to move from inefficient to efficient firms, the reform spread production out across time, as predicted by a conceptual framework of vertically connected sectors. We show that longer periods of moderate air polluting production are worse for health than shorter periods of higher intensity exposure. Our findings demonstrate the risks of piecemeal regulatory design in interlinked economies. In Chapter 3, "The Heavy Costs of High Bail: Evidence from Judge Randomization", coauthored with Ethan Frenchman and Arpit Gupta, considers the bail system in the United States. On any given day, roughly 450,000 people are detained awaiting trial, typically because they have not posted bail. Using a large sample of criminal cases in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, we analyze the consequences of the money bail system by exploiting the variation in bail-setting tendencies among randomly assigned bail judges. Our estimates suggest that the assignment of money bail causes a 12% rise in the likelihood of conviction, and a 6--9% rise in recidivism. Our results highlight the importance of credit constraints in shaping defendant outcomes and point to important fairness considerations in the institutional design of the American money bail system.

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Wars fought over oil have characterized the latter half of the past century, the repercussions of which have been felt in every corner of the globe. Although war remains a constant, attention is transitioning away from oil to another natural resource. As we move through the 21st century, water wars are now at the forefront of global conflicts. Fighting over access to this vital resource is nothing new. Allen Snitow, a documentary filmmaker and journalist claims: “For thousands of years, the conflicts between towns and countries have been defined by the battle over who gets to use the stream. The word rival and river have the same root.”1 Disputes over access to water have been inevitable because of human’s dependence on this natural resource for sustenance. The lack of a substitution for water makes the world water crisis a threat requiring immediate attention and innovative solutions. The assumed responsibility of the government to provide sustainable solutions has proven ineffective in its failure to protect the human right to water. As a world water crisis, there is a need for a more cohesive management approach. Identifying and implementing effective and equitable approaches to water management is a highly debated subject across many disciplines. A common approach to combating issues of access to potable water involves the private sector and its reliance on the market. Alternatively, some advocate for treating water as a public or community good to avoid the commodification of an essential resource. Through various examples and a fleshed out case study, I illustrate how solutions to the water crisis are not determined by theoretical frameworks, but are shaped by the viability of the approaches in a given region. The factors that influence the feasibility of an approach include: the availability of water resources and other geographical or environmental circumstances; the political stability or corruption within the government; the degree of established infrastructure; determination of who the government is responsible for providing water services to; and the specific cultural needs of different groups. By analyzing the aforementioned theoretical perspectives on water management through a lens that considers each of these factors, I attempt to identify and analyze the context for which these approaches are appropriate and effective in providing equitable access to clean water. The political, economic, cultural and geographical contexts of a region are critical in considering how to best alleviate issues of access to potable water. In addition, I argue that across all of these diverse contexts in which we identify water access issues, it is invariably necessary to treat water as a public good in order to protect the human right to water. 1 Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman, and Michael Fox, Thirst: Fighting the corporate theft of our water, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 3.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.