On Forest Rotation under Interest Rate Variability

Luis Alvarez and Erkki Koskela

International Tax and Public Finance, 2003, vol. 10, issue 4, 489-503

Abstract: The current literature on optimal forest rotation makes the unrealistic assumption of a constant interest rate although harvesting decisions of forest stands are typically subject to relatively long time horizons. We apply the single rotation framework to extend the existing studies to cover the unexplored case of variable interest rate. We show that even in the deterministic case if the current interest rate deviates from its long-run steady state, interest rate variability may change the rotation age significantly when compared with the constant discounting case. Further, and importantly, allowing for interest rate uncertainty as a mean reverting process and forest value as a geometric Brownian motion, we can provide an explicit solution for the two dimensional path-dependent optimal stopping problem. Increased interest rate volatility is shown to lengthen the optimal rotation period. Numerical calculations show that interest rate volatility has a large quantitative importance. Copyright 2003 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0927-5940/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: On Forest Rotation Under Interest Rate Variability (2003)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:itaxpf:v:10:y:2003:i:4:p:489-503

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10797/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

International Tax and Public Finance is currently edited by Ronald B. Davies and Kimberly Scharf

More articles in International Tax and Public Finance from Springer, International Institute of Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().