Quantifying factors giving rise to temporal variation in forest fires is important for advancing scientific understanding and improving fire prevention. We demonstrate that eighty percent of the large year-to-year variation in forest area burned in California can be accounted for by variation in...

Motivated by tropical deforestation, we analyze (i) a novel theory of resource extraction, (ii) the optimal conservation contract, (iii) when the donor prefers contracting with central rather than local governments, and (iv) how the donor's presence may induce institutional change. Deforestation...

Papers on optimal harvesting regimes for maximizing land expectation value (LEV) that compare different logging practices often ignore differences in variable costs and in damages on the residual stand between logging practices. We use data on a multi-age, multi-species forest in East-Kalimantan...

This paper presents a new approach to study the optimal rotation policy with amenity valuation under uncertainty. We first postulate the stochastic forest value and assume plausibly that monetary value of amenities is a continuous and non-negative function of forest value thus presenting the...

This paper develops a machine-learning method that allows researchers to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects with panel data in a setting with many covariates. Our method, which we name the dynamic causal forest (DCF) method, extends the causal-forest method of Wager and Athey (2018) by...