Water Markets.

• Author: Van Doren, Peter

"The Economic Value of Clarifying Property Rights: Evidence from Water in Idaho's Snake River Basin," by Oliver R. Browne and Xinde "James" Ji. Working paper, June 2021. Recently published: Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 119 (May 2023).

Water in the American West is again in the news. Conventional accounts often blame farmers and their excessive use in places like the vegetable-farming Central Valley. But as University of California, Santa Barbara professor Gary Libecap argued in a book review in Regulation: "Farmers are not the source of the problem.... Most would be pleased to sell or lease water that could earn more than is generated in agricultural production." (See "The Problem of Water," Fall 2014.)

However, the development of markets for water has been hampered across the West by the lack of institutional support. Although water rights exist as legal entitlements, states have historically spent few resources attempting to verify or document these rights systematically.

In a recent Regulation article...