A strong increase in the demand for some commodities over the last decade will have a major impact on their future supply situation. Of increasing importance, therefore, is an assessment of a commodity's criticality, and especially its supply risk, by appropriate indicators. The literature has...

The theory of storage, as related to commodities, makes two predictions involving the quantity of the commodity held in inventory. When inventory is low (i.e. a situation of scarcity), spot prices will exceed futures prices, and spot price volatility will exceed futures price volatility....

We employ a large dataset of physical inventory data on 21 different commodities for the period 1993-2011 to empirically analyze the behaviour of commodity prices and their volatility as predicted by the theory of storage. We examine two main issues. First, we explore the relationship between...

This paper is concerned with the classic topic of intertemporal resource economics: the optimal harvesting of renewable natural resources over time by one and several resource owners with conflicting interests. The traditional management model, dating back to Plourde (1970), is extended towards...

In this paper, we develop a new theoretical model that explains the forest transition not at a local, but at a worldwide level, in a trade liberalisation scenario. Our model has economic geography foundations: transport costs affect the distribution of firms between countries. We also introduce...

It is reasonable to consider the stock of any renewable resource as a capital stock and treat the exploitation of that resource in much the same way as one would treat accumulation of a capital stock. This has been done to some extent in earlier papers containing a discussion of this point of...

We consider here optimal use patterns for renewable resources and address the problem of optimal use of renewable resources under a variety of assumptions both about the nature of the economy in which these resources are embedded and about the objective of that economy. Although we focus here on...

We build a workable game of common-property resource extraction under rational Bayesian learning about the renewal prospects of a resource. We uncover the impact of exogenously shifting the prior beliefs of each player on the response functions of others. What we find about the role of...

In this paper, the basic assumption is that the environment provides two different kinds of services. First, the environment may serve as an input to the production of conventional goods. For example, the exploitation of an oil source from which one firm extracts the oil which in turn is used as...

This paper analyzes overlapping-generations models where natural capital is owned by selfish agents. Transfers in favor of young agents reduce the rate of depletion and increase output growth. It is shown that intergenerational transfers may be preferred to laissez-faire by an indefinite...