Three Essays on Management of Natural Resources
Creators: name: Farah, Naima
Publisher: name: Graduate Studies
Year: 2017
Subjects: subject: Economics
subject: Natural Resource Management
subject: Environmental Economics
subject: Endangered Species
subject: Water
subject: Unconventional Oil and Gas
subject: Agriculture
subject: Clean Energy

description: This dissertation contains three essays on natural resource management. Each chapter discusses a topic crucial in the field of natural resource economics. The first chapter discusses the effects of a substitute on the extraction of an open access resource, the second chapter discusses the externalities arising from the production of unconventional resources, and the third chapter discusses how countries' energy consumption preference alters with free trade. Each question studied in these three chapters relates natural resource management, production, and exploration to existing economic concepts. The first chapter studies how the rise of a mammoth ivory substitute in response to a ban on trade in elephant ivory has affected the poaching of elephants. The theoretical part shows that the early success of the ivory ban in increasing the elephant population was driven in part by increasing supply of mammoth ivory. The more recent increases in poaching appear to be driven by increasing demand and falling institutional quality. The empirical analysis finds that absent the eighty tonnes of Russian mammoth ivory exports per annum 2010-2012, that elephant ivory prices would have doubled from their $100 per kilogram level, causing the current poaching level of 34,000 elephants per year to have increased by as many as 50,000 elephants per year, out of a population of a half-million animals. In the second chapter, exploiting highly detailed data from Alberta, Canada, I quantify the external effects of hydraulic fracturing on agricultural productivity. Hydraulic fracturing (HF), a technique used to extract unconventional oil and gas, can affect agricultural land productivity through crowding out irrigation water and labor, and by affecting soil fertility. To conduct this analysis, I use temporal and spatial variation in the count of wells, in the water used by these wells, and in the agricultural production. I find that the yield of irrigated crops decreases by 4.2% when HF wells are drilled during the agriculturally active months within the township. These effects become smaller and weaker as the distance between the township and the well location increases. This study has implications for potential spatial and temporal regulations on the use of hydraulic fracturing and its associated water use. In the third chapter, I examine how free trade affects countries' per capita coal consumption. Coal is a leading source of green house gas emissions. Policymakers are concerned if free trade facilitates and increases the use of this polluting fossil fuel. To estimate the effects of openness to trade on per capita coal consumption, I exploit country level data for the period 1965 to 2014. Using geographical characteristics to instrument trade openness, I find that 1% increase in openness to trade decreases per capita coal consumption by 5.3%. This effect becomes more significant if the country is a coal importer. These results suggest that free trade increases countries' clean energy consumption and encourages to substitute coal with cleaner energy resources.