Final Exam Guide

Stocks, Values, Incentives, Institutions, and Resilience

Exam logistics

• Date: Wednesday, December 9
• Time: 8:30–10:30 AM
• Coverage: cumulative
• Authoritative instructions: Brightspace announcement for the exam

The cumulative model

For any unfamiliar resource system, identify:

1. the stock and its law of motion;
2. current valued and damaging flows;
3. private and social margins;
4. values missing from markets;
5. rights, access, and institutions;
6. intertemporal opportunity cost;
7. risk, correlation, threshold, or irreversibility; and
8. a rule that changes behavior and its distribution.

High-value comparisons

• static versus dynamic efficiency;
• market equilibrium versus efficient quantity;
• private property, common property, state property, and open access;
• stated versus revealed preference;
• MSY versus economically efficient fish stock;
• biological versus Faustmann rotation;
• risk-based price versus affordability subsidy;
• ex-ante resilience versus ex-post recovery;
• weak versus strong sustainability.

Transfer practice

Choose a resource not used in class—sand mining, lithium brines, urban tree canopy, pollinators, ski-water supply, or coastal wetlands.

In one page:

• draw or state the relevant model;
• diagnose the present path;
• recommend a rule;
• identify one distributional effect;
• name one uncertainty that could reverse the recommendation.

Calculation practice

Be prepared to complete:

• a market/externality graph;
• a present-value or two-period allocation;
• a logistic-growth or rotation comparison; and
• an expected-loss or insurance-price calculation.