the mineral economy a model for the shape of oil production curves abstract the production and the depletion of mineral resources and especially oil and fossil fuels has been an object of extensive predictive modeling these predictions are often derived from hubbert s model which is based on the fitting of the experimental data to a symmetric bell shaped curve although this model describes several historical cases in particular crude oil production in the lower 48 us states not all theoretical models for the mineral economy are based on symmetric curves also not much attention has been dedicated so far to the mechanisms which lead to such a behavior in particular scarce attention has been dedicated to the factors which may make the production curve asymmetric e g a decline in production more abrupt than the growth in the present paper the author uses a stochastic model to examine factors affecting these phenomena the results of the simulations indicate that the production curves of a non renewable resource may be asymmetric in dependence on factors such as the search strategy or the presence of technological improvements considering worldwide oil production the simulations indicate that the after peak downward slope might turn out to be considerably more steep than the upward slope something that could have unpleasant effects on the economy

nonrenewable resource scarcity nonrenewable resource theory often is summarized by hotelling s rule this paper reviews theoretical extensions and empirical investigations of resource extraction models observed data are often inconsistent with the hotelling rule suggesting that other characteristics of nonrenewable resource supply including exploration heterogeneous ore quality technological progress and capital investment are important determinants of the dynamic behavior of resource prices given the persistent recurrence of concern about nonrenewable resource scarcity measures of nonrenewable resource scarcity and the empirical evidence for the time trends of those measures are reviewed finally the implications of nonrenewable resource scarcity for economic growth are examined

innovations improvements and the optimal adoption of new technologies abstract this paper extends the literature on technology adoption by introducing a distinction between technological breakthroughs innovations and the engineering refinements improvements that follow such a breakthrough firms do not necessarily wait for a future technological breakthrough but instead have an incentive to delay the adoption of a new technology until it is sufficiently advanced we characterize a firm s adoption decision as the solution to a continuous time infinite horizon dynamic programming problem which gives rise to an ordinary differential equation that is highly non linear and does not have a closed form solution we thus employ projection techniques and show how these techniques can be applied to the analysis of optimal stopping problems

technology adoption in nonrenewable resource management technological change has played an important role in models of nonrenewable resource management since its presence mitigates the depletion effect on extraction costs over time we formalize the problem of a competitive nonrenewable resource extracting firm faced with the possibility of technology adoption based on a quadratic extraction cost function our results show that the expected net benefits from adoption increase both with the size of the resource stock and with prices a boundary that separates the region where expected net benefits are positive from the one where they are negative is derived

technological expectations and adoption of improved technology abstract attention is focused upon the adoption demand rather than the creation supply of new technology which improves from time to time based on the expected flow of technological progress over which the firm demander has no control it must decide either to adopt the current best available technology or to postpone adoption the distinguishing features of the model are that more than one technological innovation is anticipated and expectations about the likelihood of such innovations are revised as time passes since the last innovation our analysis shows that the firm will adopt the current best practice if its technological lag exceeds a certain threshold moreover as time passes without new technological advances it may become profitable to purchase a technology that has been available even though it was not profitable to do so in the past

unilateral climate policy and the green paradox extraction costs matter i analyze the effect of unilateral climate policies in a two country model where fossil fuel extraction costs depend on both current extraction and remaining stock and where a constant marginal cost clean substitute is available an intensification of climate policy in the country with an initially stricter policy does not increase early fossil fuel extraction i e there is no weak green paradox or the present value of pollution costs i e there is no strong green paradox if energy demand in that country is initially met with a mix of fossil fuel and a substitute whether a stricter climate policy in the country with an initially laxer policy causes a weak green paradox depends on the price elasticity of energy demand and the strength of the flow and stock dependence of extraction costs if the reduction of total extraction is sufficiently strong it overcompensates for a weak green paradox with respect to pollution costs thus a weak green paradox does not necessarily imply a strong green paradox due to stock dependence politique climatique unilaterale et paradoxe vert l incidence des couts d extraction l article analyse l effet des politiques climatiques unilaterales dans un modele a deux pays ou les couts d extraction de combustibles fossiles dependent a la fois de l extraction actuelle et du stock residuel et ou la disponibilite d un substitut energetique propre et constant a cout marginal demeure une intensification des politiques climatiques dans le pays de pair avec une politique initialement plus stricte n augmente ni l extraction precoce des combustibles fossiles c est a dire qu il n y a pas de paradoxe vert faible ni la valeur actuelles des couts de pollution c est a dire qu il n y a pas de paradoxe vert accru x00ab pour autant que la demande en energie dans ce pays est initialement satisfaite par une combinaison d un combustible fossile et d un substitut qu une politique climatique plus stricte dans ce pays dote d une politique initialement plus laxiste entrane un paradoxe vert moins prononce depend de l elasticite par rapport au prix de la demande d energie de l importance du flux et de la dependance en matiere de stock relativement aux couts d extraction si une reduction de l extraction totale est suffisamment forte elle surcompensera un paradoxe vert limite relativement aux couts de pollution ainsi un faible paradoxe vert n engendre pas necessairement un fort paradoxe vert en raison de la dependance au stock

on the portents of peak oil and other indicators of resource scarcity economists have studied various indicators of resource scarcity but largely ignored the phenomenon of peaking due to its connection to non economic physical theories of resource exhaustion i consider peaking from the economic point of view where economic forces determine the shape of the equilibrium extraction path within that framework i ask whether the timing of peak production reveals anything useful about scarcity i find peaking to be an ambiguous indicator if someone announced the peak would arrive earlier than expected and you believed them you would not know whether the news was good or bad however i also show that the traditional economic indicators of resource scarcity price cost and rent fare no better and argue that previous studies have misconstrued the connection between changes in underlying scarcity and movements in these traditional indicators

the central role of noise in evaluating interventions that use test scores to rank schools many programs reward or penalize schools based on students average performance mean reversion is a potentially serious hindrance to the evaluation of such interventions chile s 900 schools program p 900 allocated resources based on cutoffs in schools mean test scores this paper shows that transitory noise in average scores and mean reversion lead conventional estimation approaches to overstate the impacts of such programs it further shows how a regressiondiscontinuity design can be used to control for reversion biases it concludes that p 900 had significant effects on test score gains albeit much smaller than is widely believed

optimal timing problems in environmental economics abstract because of the uncertainties and irreversibilities that are often inherent in environmental degradation its prevention and its economic consequences environmental policy design can involve important problems of timing i use a simple two period model to illustrate these optimal timing problems and their implications for environmental policy i then lay out and solve a continuous time model of policy adoption in which the policy itself entails sunk costs and environmental damage is irreversible the model generalizes earlier work in that it includes two stochastic state variables one captures uncertainty over environmental change and the other captures uncertainty over the social costs of environmental damage solutions of the model are used to show the implications of these two types of uncertainty for the timing of policy adoption

general equilibrium electricity generation technologies and the cost of carbon abatement a structural sensitivity analysis abstract electricity generation is a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions and abatement in this sector is a key determinant of economy wide regulation costs the complexity of an integrated representation of economic and electricity systems makes simplifying assumptions appealing but there is no evidence in the literature on how important the pitfalls may be the aim of this paper is to provide such evidence drawing on numerical simulations from a suite of partial and general equilibrium models that share common technological features and are calibrated to the same benchmark data we report two basic findings first general equilibrium inter sectoral effects of an economy wide carbon policy are large it follows that assessing abatement potentials and price changes in the electricity sector with a partial equilibrium marshallian demand can only provide a crude approximation of the complex demand side interactions second we provide evidence that widely used top down representations of electricity technologies produce fuel substitution patterns that are inconsistent with bottom up cost data this supports the view that the parametrization of substitution possibilities with highly aggregated production functions is difficult to validate empirically the overall picture that emerges is one of large quantitative and even qualitative differences highlighting the role of key structural assumptions in the interpretation of climate policy projections

world oil market or mayhem the world oil market is regarded by many as a puzzle why are oil prices so volatile what is opec and what does opec do where are oil prices headed in the long run is peak oil a genuine concern why did oil prices spike in the summer of 2008 and what role did speculators play any attempt to answer these questions must be informed and disciplined by economics such is the purpose of this essay to illuminate recent developments in the world oil market from the perspective of economic theory

natural resource economics under the rule of hotelling abstract natural resource stocks held in situ are physical assets equilibrium in the assets market requires that their rates of return be such that their owners are just willing to hold on to them rather than invest elsewhere i discuss a number of factors relating to the evolution of extraction costs to the durability of the resource to market structure and to uncertainty that are important in correctly characterizing the rate of return on holding exhaustible natural resource stocks the emphasis is put on how those factors can potentially help bridge the gap between the basic hotelling s rule of natural resource exploitation and the historical behaviour of the flow price of a number of resources i also highlight some theoretical and empirical issues that need further attention

use value exchange value and resource scarcity abstract i review the literature on natural resource scarcity indicators scarcity indicators can be classified by what is being measured value of the resource stock or value of extracted resource commodities who s value is considered social vs private scarcity and by the mode of valuation considered exchange value and use value prices and rents are common measures of exchange value or indicators of exchange scarcity and unit costs can be seen as use value indicators or indicators of use scarcity the major aim of this paper is to demonstrate the links between productivity indicators such as unit costs and the classical concept of use value the two classes of indicator relate to john commons discussions of scarcity and efficiency and a marginal vs a non marginal approach to value and scarcity the classical use value concept also has wider relevance for issues of valuation in energy resource and environmental policy

economic indicators of resource scarcity a critical essay abstract the theoretical arguments of the conceptual and empirical literature on economic indicators of long run resource scarcity are logically flawed if resource allocators were informed of the nature of resource scarcity their behavior and the economic indicators it generates would reflect the scarcity but if they were so informed we could simply ask them if resources were scarce if they are not informed their behavior and economic indicators are as likely to indicate their ignorance as the reality unfortunately there is no way of knowing whether they are informed or not unless we already know whether resources are scarce

a test of the theory of exhaustible resources an empirical test of the theory of exhaustible resources requires an estimate of the time path of the shadow price of the unextracted resource that generally is not observable because of the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries in this paper we use duality theory to derive an econometric model that provides a statistical test of the theory of exhaustible resources a restricted cost function is used to obtain estimates of the shadow prices of unextracted resources the procedure is illustrated with data for the canadian metal mining industry for this industry the empirical implications of the theory of exhaustible resources are strongly rejected

exploration and scarcity noting that a suggested measure of natural resource scarcity resource rent is unobservable we show that rent is linked to observable marginal exploration cost a two period model of extraction and exploration reveals that rent is equal to this cost when discovery is certain under risky exploration cost data can be used to bound rent the model also indicates how exploration uncertainty affects the competitive firm s extraction and exploration decisions finally the behavior of u s oil and gas exploration costs suggests that these costs were rising in the postwar era which has different implications for scarcity than indicated by other measures of scarcity

the mineral economy how prices and costs can falsely signal decreasing scarcity abstract natural resource prices and costs of extraction have declined simultaneously with increasing quantities of extraction for a long time in a hotelling sense this indicates decreasing scarcity since low cost resources normally would be used first and quantities of extraction normally would decrease over time the main reason for the trend being opposite to hotelling characteristics is usually thought to be due to technological innovation however an alternative reason for decreasing costs and prices and increasing quantities of extraction may be due to georgescu roegen s georgescu roegen nicholas 1972 energy and economic myth in georgescu roegen nicholas ed energy and economic myths institutional and analytical economic essays published 1976 pergamon press new york pp 3 36 concept of bonanza where there is only the appearance of decreasing scarcity norgaard s norgaard r b 1990 economic indicators of resource scarcity a critical essay j environ econ manage 19 1 19 25 mayflower problem can be used to model an alternative neo classical approach to resource extraction and scarcity in this paper a model of resource exploration is developed where the explorer does not know total reserves of the resource base as he searches for and extracts the natural resource the explorer never entirely knows how big the resource base is but does gain information about the potential location of new reserves as discovery proceeds that reduces exploration costs the lower exploration costs can cause the price to fall over time until eventually scarcity of the resource causes the price to rise the true scarcity is only revealed towards the end of exhaustion the model shows that it is possible to have several years of increasing production simultaneous with lower prices and costs until a sudden intense price rise occurs with a huge cut in production when technology is able to cut costs and increase the reserve base the decline in prices and costs and the increase in production can last longer however even with better technology it is still possible for a sharp increase in price as long as demand is growing faster than technological innovation the problem is that the true size of the resource base is never known society does not know if technology is actually overcoming scarcity or not until demand for a resource outstrips supplies it is even possible for a price shock of incredible magnitude to surprise an economy within one or two years after a hundred years of declining prices and increasing production

the failure of input based schooling policies in an effort to improve the quality of schools governments around the world have dramatically increased the resources devoted to them by concentrating on inputs and ignoring the incentives within schools the resources have yielded little in the way of general improvement in student achievement this paper provides a review of the us and international evidence on the effectiveness of such input policies it then contrasts the impact of resources with that of variations in teacher quality that are not systematically related to school resources finally alternative performance incentive policies are described

long run implications for developing countries of joint implementation of greenhouse gas mitigation joint implementation ji calls for cooperation between industrialized and developing countries in the mitigation of greenhouse gas ghg emissions however a major concern of potential host countries is that if they utilize their low cost options for ji now they will be left with only high cost options in the future thereby penalizing them at a time when they may be obligated to mitigate ghgs themselves this paper formalizes this hypothesis by utilizing an optimal control framework analogous to the hotelling model of non renewable resource extraction the results are that cumulative abatement effects can impose costs on the future but that they can be offset by technological change market power or compensation

how accountability pressure on failing schools affects student achievement abstract although an emerging body of evidence has shown that the threat of sanctions on low performing schools can raise student test scores in the short run the extent to which these test score improvements are due to schools manipulation of the accountability system has remained uncertain in this paper i provide two new strands of evidence to evaluate the relative importance of educational reforms and gaming behavior in generating test score gains by threatened schools first using a regression discontinuity design that exploits florida s system of imposing sanction threats on the basis of a cutoff level of performance i estimate medium run effects on student test scores from having attended a threatened elementary school threat induced math improvements from elementary school largely persist at least through the first 1 to 2 years of middle school while evidence for persistence of reading improvements is less consistent second i analyze the effects of sanction threats on various features of educational production and i find that sanction threats raise school spending on instructional technology curricular development and teacher training both strands of evidence are consistent with a predominant role for educational reforms in generating test score gains by threatened schools

poverty risks and national parks policy issues in conservation and resettlement summary is the conflict between biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction which frequently arises in park creation programs insoluble the authors report empirical evidence from 12 case studies from six countries which are analyzed through the conceptual lens of the impoverishment risks and reconstruction model for involuntary resettlement the research concludes conservatively that parks in the congo basin have already displaced and impoverished about 120 150 000 people and that more will be displaced if this approach continues despite its deleterious outcomes the authors argue that the park establishment strategy predicated upon compulsory population displacement has exhausted its credibility and compromised the cause of biodiversity conservation by inflicting aggravated impoverishment on very large numbers of people they recommend that the concerned governments should desist using the eviction approach the alternative course proposed by the authors is to replace forced displacements with a pro poor strategy that pursues double sustainability to protect both the biodiversity and people s livelihoods at the same time 2006 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

on the inevitable return of higher oil prices abstract must oil prices eventually return to or rise above their 1980 peak levels or will history record that high oil prices were a passing phenomenon this article argues that their return to higher levels is inevitable many perhaps most energy analysts apparently accept this view but some do not among those who expect higher oil prices there is a split on the question of when most look to the 1990s but some say it will be a century or more

integrating information about the cost of carbon through activity based costing abstract environmental protection has been an issue of serious concern for many years it is not a trend but the responsibility of corporations this responsibility for environmental protection should be internalized into business operations prior to production in order to reflect the true cost of the final product due to the use of traditional cost accounting many organizations have not estimated their environmental costs precisely therefore environmental accounting systems such as carbon management accounting environmental management accounting and greenhouse gas accounting have attracted worldwide attention in this paper we propose an integrated concept the activity based costing approach to solve the problem of environmental and cost evaluation we include a case study of an existing pulp and paper company in taiwan to show that the activity based costing method estimates emissions of waste and the environmental costs of a final product more accurately than traditional approaches do the method can therefore provide information for use in existing environmental accounting systems and help managers incorporate environmental costs into their decision making processes

cost benefit analysis and environmental policy the use of cost benefit analysis cba in british environmental policy has gone through several stages early applications of cba tended to ignore environmental impacts altogether leave them for a subsidiary impact analysis or provide only a partial monetization of impacts currently cba is the subject of renewed interest in government departments in the environment agency and among other agencies providing guidance and advice to government while the amount of cba being undertaken has increased its influence on policy making is open to question obstacles remain much cba is expensive and this means that benefits transfer is widely regarded as essential currently however the validity of much benefits transfer is questionable other problems arise from misunderstandings about the nature of economic values and the links to individuals self interest and from concerns that cba results will crowd out flexibility in decision making especially the likely context of multiple political objectives over and above economic efficiency none the less cba has begun to have influence in the setting of environmental taxes and alternative decision rules appear to suffer as many if not more shortcomings as those faced by cba copyright 1998 by oxford university press

beyond incentives do schools use accountability rewards productively we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze an understudied aspect of school accountability systems how schools use financial rewards for two years california s accountability system financially rewarded schools based on a deterministic function of test scores qualifying schools received per pupil awards amounting to about 1 of statewide per pupil spending corroborating anecdotal evidence that awards were paid out as teacher bonuses we find no evidence that winning schools purchased more instructional material increased teacher hiring or changed the subject specific composition of their teaching staff most importantly we find no evidence that student achievement increased in winning schools supplemental materials for this article are available online

do federal grants boost school spending evidence from title i abstract one of the federal government s main elementary and secondary education programs is title i which allocates money for compensatory education to school districts based on child poverty i use sharp changes in per pupil grant amounts surrounding the release of decennial census data to identify effects of title i on state and local education revenue and how much the program ultimately increases spending by recipient school districts i find that state and local revenue efforts initially are unaffected by title i changes but that local governments substantially and significantly crowd out changes in title i within in a 3 year period

the clean development mechanism s low hanging fruit problem when might it arise and how might it be solved it is widely recognized that industrialized countries commitments under the kyoto protocol to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions will be far less costly to achieve if they can be met at least in part through investment in cheap abatement options available in developing countries as is permitted under the protocol s clean development mechanism developing country ngos and others involved in the policy debate on the cdm have frequently raised concerns however about the so called low hanging fruit problem the standard characterization of this problem is that if developing countries allow their cheap abatement options to be used now they may find themselves worse off in future when they take on emissions reduction commitments of their own because only expensive abatement options will remain we show that under plausible cdm market imperfections a low hanging fruit problem may indeed arise but that the standard characterization of the problem is incorrect we also present a potential solution based on mandating a virtual option clause in cdm investment contracts

the promise and pitfalls of using imprecise school accountability measures in recent years most states have constructed elaborate accountability systems using school level test scores however because the median elementary school contains only 69 children per grade level such measures are quite imprecise we evaluate the implications for school accountability systems for instance rewards or sanctions for schools with scores at either extreme primarily affect small schools and provide weak incentives to large ones nevertheless we conclude that accountability systems may be worthwhile even in states with aggressive financial incentives the marginal reward to schools for raising student performance is a small fraction of the potential labor market value for students

extraction costs and the economics of nonrenewable resources the study questions the fundamental assumption of the standard aggregate exploration extraction model of nonrenewable resources that extraction costs and the level of reserves are inversely related it also raises questions about the model s conclusions regarding exploration incentives and the valuation of reserves an empirically tested disaggregate model is presented that suggests that exploration activity occurs from firms attempting to balance marginal extraction plus user costs at the intensive and extensive margins exploration is carried out until the marginal discovery cost of a deposit equals its present asset value and a u shaped price path is indicated

finders keepers forfeiture laws policing incentives and local budgets to encourage anti drug policing the federal government and many state governments have enacted laws that allowpoliceagencies tokeepasubstantial fractionofthe assets thattheyseizeindrugarrests weuserich new data on police seizures and local spending to explore the reactions of both governments and police to the incentives created by these policies we find that local governments offset police seizures by reducing their other allocations to police partially undermining the incentives laid out in statute and diverting the earmarked funds to other purposes police in turn respond to the real net incentives for seizures once local offsets are takenintoaccount byincreasingthedrugarrestrate heroinpricesalsoincrease suggestingthattheincreased emphasis on anti drug policing raises the supply costs of illicit drugs these findings highlight both the promise and pitfalls of using financial incentives to solve agency problems in a federal system both local agents and intervening governments have sophisticated responses to financial incentives and these responses must be taken into account in both designing effective policies and evaluating their consequences 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

the time path of scarcity rent in the theory of exhaustible resources there is now a consensus in the literature on resource economics that a depletable resource should command a price in excess of its marginal extraction cost simply to reflect the opportunity cost of using a unit of it today rather that conserving it for the future but how this excess is to change along an optimal or competitive equilibrium path of resource use is still an unresolved question this might at first seem puzzling since according to the fundamental theorem of economics of exhaustible resources or hotelling i 93 i rule on an optimal path price minus marginal extraction cost also termed interchangeably as scarcity rent user cost or royalty should steadily grow over time at the social rate of discount however the literature contains sharply contrasting views on the subject for example kay and mirrlees 1975 have argued that since along an optimal path the scarcity rent grows exponentially as a finite stock of a resourcexnears exhaustion then situations in which the resource stock is still very large and yet the price greatly exceeds the marginal extraction cost should indicate that the price is significantly above its optimal level and that the resource is overconserved in stark contrast to this view heal i976 has argued that as the resource stock nears exhaustion the difference between price and marginal cost or what he termed social cost of extraction falls monotonically to zero hanson i980 analyses the same model as heal s but unlike heal who assumes the unit extraction cost to be convex he postulates it to be concave and yet like heal concludes that the scarcity rent will be monotonically declining over time solow and wan i976 analyse a still different situation where resource deposits differ in quality and the unit extraction cost increases as higher grade deposits are exhausted and extraction proceeds to lower grades they show that along an optimal path the shadow price of a resource must rise at the real rate of interest despite differential extraction costs but that the difference between price and the marginal extraction cost or what they call degradation charge declines monotonically over time to zero these sharply differing conclusions suggest that far from being resolved the question of how scarcity rent changes over time is much in want of a close scrutiny the need for such a scrutiny becomes even stronger once it is noted

optimal timing of technology adoption abstract in a dynamic programming framework this paper investigates the optimal timing of technology adoption by a competitive firm when technology choice is irreversible and the firm faces a stochastic innovation process with uncertainties about both the speed of the arrival and the degree of improvement of new technologies a numerical example illustrates how the optimal timing decision is affected by changes in parameter values reflecting market conditions the firm s initial technological attributes and the characteristics of the stochastic innovation process some of these effects turn out to be in sharp contrast to common intuition contrasting the optimal decision rule derived here with the rule obtained under the net present value shows that the former implies a slower pace of adoption than implied by the latter the optimal decision rule is generalized for the case of multiple technology switches and it is shown that for all the switching decisions except the last one the optimal rule satisfies the net present value criterion

do accountability and voucher threats improve low performing schools abstract we study the effects of the threat of vouchers and stigma in florida on the performance of low performing schools estimates of the change in raw test scores from the first year of the reform are consistent with the early results which claimed large improvements associated with the threat of vouchers however we also find that much of this estimated effect may be due to other factors the relative gains in reading are largely explained by changing student characteristics and the gains in math though larger appear limited to the high stakes grade we also find some evidence that these improvements were due more to the stigma of receiving the low grade rather than the threat of vouchers

technological change and the dynamics of resource scarcity measures abstract within a general competitive model of resource extraction this paper investigates the effect of technological change on the time paths of resource scarcity measures cost price and rent and the possible relationship between them it shows that the effect of technological change depends crucially on whether it is extraction biased or depletion biased it derives conditions under which the three measures move together and when they do not it argues in favor of rent as a more reliable indicator of scarcity change the theoretical insights obtained here help to explain both the sharp contrast of empirical results regarding the time trend of a specific measure as well as the observed lack of harmony among the time paths of the measures

information and exhaustible resources a bayesian analysis abstract we develop a continuous time bayesian model of investment in information about an exhaustible resource because of the way that information affects expectations the deterministic hotelling rule turns out to be more appropriate as a description of how resource owners forecast the value of their stocks than as a predictor of observed changes in the resource price a flow of information generates both unanticipated changes in expectations which cause the mean rate of change in the resource price to deviate systematically from the deterministic hotelling rule and reductions in uncertainty which do not affect the hotelling prediction

untested hypotheses in non renewable resource economics the present paper reviews the literature on the empirical implications of the hotelling rule and suggests directions for further research in this area

accruing benefit or loss from a protected area location matters abstract the spatial distribution of protected area direct benefits and losses were mapped for twenty five villages around kibale national park uganda benefits included park based employment tourism revenue sharing integrated conservation and development projects and resource access agreements losses were caused by park protected animals raiding crops and preying on livestock local perceptions of benefit and loss associated with the park were collected from focus groups and a household survey valuation data were derived from interviews the survey and measurement of crop losses eight villages accrued an annual net benefit as a result of the park while 17 villages accrued a net loss net benefitting villages were located near park based employment and resource access associations involved in beekeeping households within 0 5 km of the park boundary accrued the highest losses while benefits distributed up to 15 km away the ugandan wildlife authority uwa needs to focus benefits closer to the park boundary to support those who lose most from park protected animals and away from areas with park based employment to more evenly distribute benefits around the circumference of the park attitudes toward the park appear to be shaped by loss aversion suggesting uwa and conservation agencies should focus on loss mitigation rather than benefit provision

on measuring natural resource scarcity conclusions concerning trends in natural resource scarcity may depend critically on the choice of scarcity index unfortunately the prevalence of vertical integration in natural resource industries has hindered the use of some otherwise desirable scarcity measures in this paper duality theory is used to derive an econometric procedure for estimating one such measure the shadow price of the resource in situ empirical results for the canadian metal mining industry indicate that resource scarcity as measured by this shadow price has decreased substantially over time