Stochastic Dominance Portfolio Analysis of Forestry Assets

Abstract

We consider the forestry decision-making and harvesting problem from the perspective of financial portfolio management, where harvestable forest stands constitute one of the liquid assets of the portfolio. Using real data from Finnish mixed borealis forests and from the Helsinki stock exchange, we investigate the effect of trading the timber stock together with the forest land, or without the land (i.e., harvesting), on the portfolio efficiency. As our research methodology, we utilize the general Stochastic Dominance (SD) criteria, focusing on the recent theoretical advances in analyzing portfolio diversification within the SD framework. Our findings shed some further light on the question of how to model the forestry planning problem, and provide some comparative evidence of the applicability of the alternative SD test approaches.Forest Management, Portfolio Optimization, Stochastic Dominance, Diversification