Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Economics Research Institute Study Paper

Volume

10

Publisher

Utah State University Department of Economics

Publication Date

1998

First Page

1

Last Page

17

Abstract

In recent times, a great deal of concern has been expressed about the decline in the USA's old growth forests. Although there is broad agreement among reserachers that old growth forests provide timber and amenity services, and that forest harvesting decisions are inherently stochastic, there have been very few formal analyses that have explicitly accounted for these aspects of the old growth forest management problem. Consequently, in this paper I study these aspects of the problem by formulating the decision to conserve or harvest an old growth forest as a Markovian stochastic control problem. I then show how this control problem can be analyzed numerically using standard linear programming techniques.


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