Recent Publications
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By Brent Sohngen and Robert Mendelsohn The American Economic Review This paper establishes a methodology for valuing the impact of large-scale ecological changes in a market. Given the large capital stocks inherent in most ecological systems, the dynamic nature of most ecological change, and the dynamic response of markets, it is critical to build dynamic models to capture the resulting effects. This paper demonstrates how to construct such a model using the impacts of climate change on U.S. timber markets as an example. Across a wide range of scenarios and models, warming is predicted to...
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By Brent Sohngen, Robert Mendelsohn, and Roger Sedjo Ecological models predict that climate change will have widespread impacts on the distribution and growth of forests around the globe. This paper carefully links these impacts to a dynamic global timber market model in order to determine how markets will adapt to these changes. The results suggest that climate change will expand long term global timber supply, timber prices will fall, and the welfare from timber will increase between 3.0 and 6.7%. Although global harvests increase, the area of both industrial and remaining inaccessible...
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Differences in timber market models that arise from alternative assumptions and fundamental differences in theory and structure can lead to disparate published results, as well as confusion among policy analysts and industry. This paper presents a thorough comparison of four widely used models, and then analyzes a set of published market predictions relative to historical data. The goal is to understand how fundamental differences between the models may affect market predictions. Several conclusions are drawn. First, market outlooks are largely a function of exogenous demand growth and...
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By Brent Sohngen, Robert Mendelsohn, and Roger Sedjo This paper addresses the effectiveness of tree planting and forest conservation strategies to increase the sink of carbon in global forests. Because forests are expected to sequester additional carbon without explicit human intervention, a baseline case is presented. The baseline predicts that forests will sequester an additional 17.9 Pg (1015 grams) of carbon over the next 150 years, with nearly 95% of this accruing to storage in marketed forest products. The paper then compares strategies which assume markets adjust to changes in future...
Vickner, Steven S., Dana L. Hoag, W. Marshall Frasier, and James C. Ascough II. “A Dynamic Economic Analysis of Nitrate Leaching in Corn Production under Nonuniform Irrigation Conditions.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics. 80(Number 2, 1998):397-408 Click Here
Vickner, Steven S. and Dana L. Hoag. “Advances in Ration Formulation for Beef Cattle through Multiple Objective Decision Support Systems.” In Multiple Objective Decision Making for Land, Water and Environmental Management. Edited by Samir A. El-Swaify and Diana S. Yakowitz. Boca Raton, FL: Lewis Publishers, 1998:291-298 (ISBN 1-57444-091-8) Click Here
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(with Mark M. Pitt) This paper describes the energy transition in Indonesia and examines the determinants of energy demand, by fuel. The key innovation of this paper is the documentation of how these relationships have evolved over time. We find that parameter change, defined as changes in the magnitude of the effect of parameters (e.g., income, demographic characteristics) on consumer demand, explains the large majority of changes in energy demand. Demographic change is found to play an important role in accelerating the energy transition, with parameter change magnifying this effect even...
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(with Katrina Kosec and Valerie Mueller) Migration is a known livelihood strategy for the rural poor. Research on mobility and its impact on household welfare is seldom investigated due to the omission of pertinent questions on standard household surveys. Furthermore, the framing of questions can lead to the computation of misleadingly, low migration rates and household well-being measures depending on the respondent, recall period, and inclusion of the absent migrant’s income. In 2013-4, 726 original households of the Pakistan Rural Household Panel Survey (1986-1991) were resurveyed. The...
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The Bangladesh Delta is at the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers and home to over 158 million people with a high growth rate of ~2.5 million people per year. It is continuously threatened by monsoonal flooding, sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, sediment load, coastal erosion, land subsidence, blockage of river run-off, and accelerated mountain glacier melt. In the face of such climate variability, residents face tremendous environmental risk related to annual crop/income loss as well as potentially permanent loss of assets and livelihoods. This paper uses a long-...
The use of development impact fees to finance public facilities that are necessary to service new growth is a practice that has gained importance and acceptance in the last decade. In the U.S. the practice and widespread use of the DIF are asymmetric. Even though DIF are widely accepted, many public officials, developers and the general public do not yet understand the need for DIF and their effect on the economy. There are important policy and legal issues involved. Selected state experience is reviewed here. By Lawrence Libby