Gary Libecap

Gary Libecap is professor of Corporate Environmental Management at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research focuses on how or under what circumstances property rights to natural and environmental resources can be defined and enforced to address the problems of open access, and how or when markets might be developed as options for more-effective resource management and allocation. He examines the bargaining and transaction costs involved in collective action to establish property institutions and markets. His work encompasses economics and law, economic history, natural resource economics, and economic geography. Libecap has authored or co-authored over 200 scholarly papers in peer-reviewed journals, chapters in academic volumes, and research reports. His series, Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Growth, has twenty-two volumes; he served as editor of the series from 1985 to 2011. His latest books are Owens Valley Revisited: A Reassessment of the West’s First Great Water Transfer (Stanford University Press, 2007), The Economics of Climate Change: Adaptations Past and Present, co-edited with Richard Steckel (University of Chicago Press and NBER, 2011), and Environmental Markets: A Property Rights Approach, with Terry L. Anderson (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His Ph.D. in economics is from the University of Pennsylvania.