Lab Seminar - Vicious or Virtuous: Estimating the effect of wood product demand shifts on U.S. forest carbon storage
Emily McGlynn updated her work on forest carbon storage. Following on her critique of Aguilar et al. (2020) , she describe her own proposed research to identify the effect of shifts in wood product demand on the amount of carbon stored in forests. First she walked through a simple structural model that accounts for oligopsonist wood mill pricing and wood sourcing, as well as landowner net present value maximization, to show that the effect of a marginal increase in demand for wood products can result in ambiguous and non-marginal impacts on forest carbon stocks when wood mill entry is possible. Then she briefly described an econometric strategy to identify the effects of historical pulp mill entry on surrounding forest carbon stocks over the past 40 years.