Die empirische Messung des Grenzzinses in der Forstwirtschaft: Aus der Abteilung Forstökonomie, Universität Göttingen.

The issue of normative decision models in forest economics is to evaluate the best possible decision from a given set of possible operations. In decisions about capital usage, the interest rate functions as guide-price, when foresters decide to harvest trees or forest stands. When enterprise-specific restrictions like sustainability of capital maintenance are considered, the interest rate is not exogenously determined any more but results from the enterprise-specific attributes and the aims of the decision maker. The interest rate itself is therefore no input parameter any more but a result from the decisions made by the forester within the ecological reasoned boundaries in a dynamic forest ecosystem. In this essay, we make use of discrete choice models to estimate the real empirical endogenous interest rate from an empirical dataset. We use the German National Forest Inventories 1 and 2 to estimate the interest rates where harvesting decisions were made in time frame of 15 years for distinct types of ownerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]