Course Description
This course will provide an introduction to the principles, reasoning, and techniques required to set up and solve dynamic natural resource allocation problems. The economic models and numerical tools developed are applied to renewable resources (e.g., fisheries, forestry, and water), nonrenewable resources (e.g., coal, oil, and metals), and stock pollutants (e.g., nutrients, ozone, and greenhouse gases). This course relies heavily on computational analysis using the spreadsheet program Excel.
Text
Required Text
Jon M. Conrad. Resource Economics, 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press. 2010.
Suggested Text
Barry C. Field. Natural Resource Economics: An Introduction, 3rd Edition. 2016.
Knut Sydsaeter and Peter Hammond. Essential Mathematics for Economic Analysis, 3rd Edition. 2008.
Kevin Wainwright and Alpha Chiang. Fundamental Methods of Mathematical Economics, 4th Edition. 2004.
Prerequisites
ECON 300 (Intermediate Microeconomics) and ECON309 (Introductory Statistics and Econometrics) are required for all students in this class.
The course presumes a solid understanding of calculus and statistics and a basic understanding of differential/difference equations. If you are unfamiliar with these topics, but still want to take the course, you should familiarize yourself with the concepts by reading the relevant introductory material on these topics in a mathematics text (see the suggested texts). It is further assumed that you have a good understanding of how to manipulate Excel spreadsheets. We will rely heavily on computational analysis in this course.