Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item Optimal economic control strategies in forest resource management(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 1974) Anwar, AffendiItem The political economy of prescribed fires : a land agency's decision to burn(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 2010) Berreth, Mark Alan; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: David E. Buschena.National land agencies ignite hundreds of prescribed fires every year throughout the Rocky Mountain West. When a national land agency proposes a prescribed fire they must by statute take public opinion into account before igniting the burn. The public interest of a prescribed fire may be to decrease the acreage of the burn in order to save animal habitat or possibly to stop a burn entirely. A theoretical model where a land agency maximizes a net social expected benefit was used to develop comparative static results in the empirical analysis. Using county Sierra Club membership as a proxy for protests, this thesis analyzes acreage differences and timing differences of prescribed fires. First, a probit model is used to evaluate the probability of a wildland urban interface prescribed fire. The regression results present a higher probability of wildland urban interface prescribed fires at the median of county Sierra Club membership as a percent of county population, ceteris paribus. County Sierra Club membership as a percent of county population was not statistically significant in explaining proportion acreage changes from proposed to actual acres burnt. Timing differences, on the other hand, were found to increase as county Sierra Club membership as a percent of county population increased, ceteris paribus. The empirical results imply that land agencies treat their prescribed fires that are in the wildland urban interface the same. There are also timing differences that can be explained through pressure from group interest in land agency policies.Item An analysis of bidding behavior at U.S. Forest Service timber auctions(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Agriculture, 1996) Brenner, Brenda Lee; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Randal R. Rucker.The Forest Service is mandated to receive a "fair market value" for its timber. Noncompetitive bidding may lead to lower than fair market values of timber and thus large losses in federal revenues. Knowing where noncompetitive bidding is most likely to occur may allow the Forest Service to effectively mitigate noncompetitive bidding and antitrust resources to be allocated efficiently. A multi-stage procedure is developed for identifying the market areas where bidding is least competitive. The third stage of the procedure introduces an innovative method for analyzing the competitiveness of bidding behavior. This new method compares the differential impacts of regular and nonregular bidders on bid price. The application of the multi-stage procedure to nine forests in Washington and Oregon reveals noncompetitive bidding may have been present in two forests between 1973 and 1981. Analyses of later years (1985-90) reveal, however, that the noncompetitive bidding that may have been present in earlier years greatly diminished.