• John Locke Update

    Is that a meth lab in your pants?

    posted May 2, 2012 by Jon Sanders
    View in your browser. So last week in Oklahoma at a traffic stop, police noticed a chemical smell, a passenger took off running, and in the scuffle…
  • Research Report

    Catch Shares: A Potential Tool to Undo a Tragedy of the Commons in NC Fisheries

    posted May 1, 2012 by Jon Sanders
    Declining fish stocks are affecting N.C. fishermen and fishing communities despite the U.S. government spending $70 million a year to bail out failing federally managed fisheries under traditional management systems. Catch shares are a transformative approach to fisheries management that inject property rights into the fisheries to produce a sea change in incentives. Catch shares eliminate race to fish, encourage a more discriminating harvest, and reduce bycatch. Research finds strong links between catch shares and improved economic and biological performance of fisheries and that switching fisheries to catch share systems not only slows their decline but possibly stops (or even reverses) it.
  • John Locke Update

    The Green Emperor Has No Sprouts

    posted April 18, 2012 by Jon Sanders
    View in your browser. A headline from Reuters this week was remarkably understated: "Analysis: Obama’s ‘green jobs’ have been slow to sprout." Slow to sprout? That…
  • Research Report

    Just Not Worth the Gamble: The NC Education Lottery’s many problems have a common solution

    posted February 1, 2011 by Jon Sanders
    The North Carolina Education Lottery was sold as a way to boost education spending, but N.C. boasts the same problem found in other lottery states: a declining rate of spending for education, especially in comparison with the rest of the state budget. Furthermore, poverty, unemployment, and property tax rates remain the best predictors of lottery sales.