FREC 424/624: Resource Economics -- Course Syllabus
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30--10:45 AM, Mitchell Hall room 001

Instructor: John Mackenzie
office: Townsend 215
e-mail: johnmack@udel.edu
office phone: 302-8310-1312
office hours: Wednesdays 2-3 PM or by appointment

Assignments:
  1. Indexes, Welfare Measures & Market Distortions
  2. Demographics, Resources & Development
  3. Discounting for Time and Risk
  4. Optimal Resource Depletion Trajectories
  5. Resource Depletion: Model Variations
  6. Logistic Growth Models; Forest Management
  7. Open-Access Fishery Models
  8. Travel-Cost Models of Recreation Demand
dept. phone: 302-831-2511
fax: 302-831-6243
cell: 302-373-3723

Practice Exercises and Power Tools
  1. Linear Regression and Exercises
  2. Discounting
  3. Risk, Hedging and Insurance
  4. Basics of Game Theory
  5. Calculus Review
  6. Constrained Optimization
  7. Linear Programming

US National Debt 		more real-time clocks

Recommended text: Tietenberg, Tom. Environmental & Natural Resource Economics. (New York: Addison-Wesley)
not required; if you want background reading buy any recent edition (used) online.

Grading: Homework assignments total 60 points plus 2 hour exams @ 20 points each = 100 points.

FIRST HOUR EXAM (09S)         SECOND HOUR EXAM (09S)

Course Description:  How competitive market processes yield efficient allocations of resources through time and between alternative uses; how various market failures arise and affect allocative efficiency; how government policies can correct or worsen market failures.

This course assumes you know some calculus and MS-Excel. Assignments must be submitted by their due dates; no late work will be accepted. You may consult with other students in on how to tackle the problem sets, but the work you turn in must be your own. You are assumed to know the University's policies on academic honesty as explained in the leaflet distributed by the Office of the Dean of Students; these will be strictly enforced.

Course Outline:
  1. Intro
  2. Resource rents
  3. Efficiency and Sustainability
  4. Malthus and the commons problem
  5. Economic surpluses & market distortions
  6. Property rights & externalities
  7. More market failures
  8. Government failures; public choice
  9. Innumeracy and inefficiency
  10. Benefit-cost analysis
  11. Mineral reserves and depletion
  12. Two-period depletion model
  13. Depletion over an indeterminate time horizon
  14. OPEC and the political economy of oil
  1. Energy markets and policies and final notes on depletion
  2. Guns, Germs & Steel
  3. Hour Exam
  4. Risk, hedging, market derivatives and insurance
  5. Land economics
  6. Food and agriculture; US farm policy
  7. Logistic growth models
  8. Forest resources: timber stand management; US forest policy
  9. Marine fisheries; overharvesting; management strategies
  10. Wildlife resources; predator-prey and other dynamics
  11. Biodiversity, endangered species, habitat conservation
  12. Resource exploitation in LDC's; war and famine
  13. Hunger and malnutrition
  14. Hour Exam