The Seventh International Faustmann Symposium: The Faustmann approach around the world

Forest Policy and Economics · 2024

• Economics

The Sixth International Faustmann Symposium: The mathematical way of thinking continues to yield

Forest Policy and Economics · 2020

• Computer Science
• Mathematical optimization
• Computer Science

Government Farm Programs and Climate Change: A First Look

2019-04-10 · 5 citations

This chapter deals with a discussion of climate change as it relates to United States agriculture. It explores readers with the objectives, structure, tools, and costs of farm policy and provides a brief overview of government farm programs. The chapter considers some of the ways in which farm programs could either mitigate or aggravate the social costs of climate change. The lack of agreement among atmospheric scientists about the likely physical effects of emissions of greenhouse gases is only one source of uncertainty concerning climate change for agriculture. Viewing the predicted impacts of climate change individually is very misleading. Ecosystems are dynamic, and the individual elements of any new climate would interact with each other as well as with a host of other environmental processes. Publicly financed research and extension could also help mitigate the costs of climate change. The magnitude of the costs of climate change may well depend on how fast farmers adapt to new environmental conditions.

Timber Harvesting with Fluctuating Prices

2018-02-06 · 1 citations

Because of volatility in demand, timber prices tend to fluctuate from year to year. Timber owners know today's price but are uncertain about tomorrow's prices. Traditional Faustmann harvesting ignores these random annual price fluctuations and prescribes harvests on the basis of expected prices. This chapter discusses an asset sale model to forestry and solves for the optimal schedule of reservation prices. When current price is above the reservation price, owners should cut that age class, otherwise they should wait another year. This flexible price harvest policy significantly increases the present value of expected returns over the more rigid Faustmann model. A common assumption in economics is that the error structure around an empirical model's predictions is normally distributed. The most important measure of the desirability of flexible price harvesting is the resulting increase in the expected net present value of future timber revenue.

Impacts of declining discount rates on optimal harvest age and land expectation values

Journal of Forest Economics · 2017-09-19 · 16 citations

Several national governments now require the discount rate for public projects with long planning horizons to decrease over the life of a project. Theoretical results that characterize the impacts of a declining discount rate on optimal harvest age and land expectation values in the Faustmann Model are presented. New results include: derivation of conditions for a sequences of optimal harvest ages and land expectation values, comparative statics results, conditions that must be satisfied for multiple optima, and proof that harvesting is never optimal immediately before a discrete decrease in the discount rate.

Measuring Hazardous Waste Damages with Panel Models

SSRN Electronic Journal · 2016-02-19 · 2 citations

This study extends the use of panel data to analyze the damage associated with proximity to a hazardous waste site. Panel data can control for property specific factors which affect sale values, allowing the analysis to focus upon both the spatial and intertemporal factors associated with pollution. We contrast alternative econometric approaches which are applicable to panel data sets and discuss an important application which has led to sizeable natural resource damages actually being paid.

Risk and Uncertainty in Forest Resources Decision Making

2015-02-17

Optimal Forest Rotation with Multiple Product Classes

Forest Science · 2014-11-29 · 12 citations

Risk and uncertainty in forest resources decision making

2014-04-03

Risk has been an important topic in forest economics since the early 1980s. This chapter will address problems of risk, although problems of pure uncertainty will be discussed as a future research area. We will survey the problems, models, and results from the literature, focusing more on how problems have been approached, the assumptions under which these problems have been studied, and the types of results that have been found. The discussion is separated into three parts. First, there are cases in which forest stands, once established, are subject to the arrival of natural or catastrophic natural events such as fire or disease that may occur before trees are harvested. Second are cases in which future market parameters are unknown and landowners must make land-use or forest management decisions in the present. And finally, we discuss key opportunities for future work regarding realistic situations and risks faced by forest landowners.

Faustmann continues to yield

Journal of Forest Economics · 2011-08-01 · 6 citations