Bryan Leonard

I am an associate professor of environmental and natural resource economics and the SER Chair of Environment and Natural Resources in the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources and the  School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming. 

I am also an Affiliate of the Environmental Markets Lab at UC Santa Barbara and the Ostrom Workshop, as well as a Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, where I co-direct summer research fellowships. I serve on the editorial board at Land Economics.

My research explores the efficiency and equity implications of different institutional responses to environmental and natural resource problems, focusing on land, water, and other resources.  I study the historical context of policies that are crafted to solve resource challenges at a particular point in time and assess their long-run sustainability using an interdisciplinary approach that builds on my background in economics in collaboration with legal scholars, political theorists, and natural scientists. I am especially interested in the conditions under which property rights and markets perform better or worse than other institutions. This often leads me to focus on the contemporary legacies of historical policies developed during Westward Expansion in the 19th-century United States, when various new systems of property were developed.