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Timber and Amenities on Nonindustrial Private Forest Land

Informally Refereed

Abstract

Economic analyses of the joint production timber and amenities from nonindustrial private forest lands (NIPF) have been conducted for several decades. Binkley (1981) summarized this strand of research and elegantly articulated a microeconomic household model in which NIPF owners maximize utility by choosing optimal combinations of timber income and amenities. Most follow-up attempts have been limited to either simulations based on stylized characterization of joint production (Max and Lehman 1988) or to empirical representations hampered by data limitations-particularly with regard to measuring amenity production (Hyberg and Holthausen 1989). In attempting to redress this gap, Holmes (1986) was limited to binary representations of timber and amenities and did not get conclusive results. In this chapter, we use data from North Carolina that includes timber output and amenity indices to illustrate a method for empirically characterizing Binkley's household model.

Citation

Pattanayak, Subhrendu K.; Abt, Karen Lee; Holmes, Thomas P. 2003. Timber and Amenities on Nonindustrial Private Forest Land. In: Sills, Erin O.; Abt, Karen Lee, eds. Forests in a market economy. 2003. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 243-258.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/6376