The decision of whether to retain forest or convert to another land use is affected by uncertainty over future land-use returns. This paper examines the design of conservation payments to landowners under uncertainty. Payments are indexed to the returns from forest conversion (agriculture), or...

We propose a heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) model with time-varying parameters in the form of a local linear random forest. In contrast to conventional random forests that approximate the volatility nonparametrically using local averaging, the building blocks of our forest are HAR panel...