Optimal investment in a nonrenewable resource project occurs when the rate of increase of the project's forward value falls to the force of interest. This stopping rule yields a financial interpretation of resource quality as being a property of the project rather than of individual units of...

Input substitution theoretically invalidates the resource flow predictions of effective rates of protection calculated in a partial equilibrium framework. Partial equilibrium effective protection analysis, despite this "substitution problem," has nevertheless quietly settled into the trade...

Between 1995 and 2001, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner published a series of influential studies examining mining and energy’s role in economic growth. Their principle finding was that economies heavily dependent on extractive activities in 1971 grew more slowly than non-extractive economies...

Mineral assets consistently trade at market values greater than their discounted cash flow (DCF) values. One explanation is that DCF analysis does not and cannot incorporate the asset value generated by asset management under uncertainty. This paper surveys the attempts to empirically quantify...

Observing that net prices do not rise as predicted and that resource stocks are not fixed, Adelman questions Hotelling's model of an exhaustible resource. He cites a rule of thumb for valuing oil reserves which is about onehalf that given by the Hotelling valuation principle. We apply an...

We modify the approach to valuing mineral reserves that is current in economic literature by considering a net present-value rule under uncertainty. Direct application of Hotelling's rule is found to be inappropriate. The modification is such that the present value is approximately half that...