M. Ryan Haley and Harry J. Paarsch, "The Stochastic Implications of Rent Maximization: An Application to Stumpage Rates for Timber in British Columbia", Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2004, pp. 25-48. All data are in the file hpdata.dat, an ASCII file in DOS format, which is zipped in the file hpdata.zip. Unix users should use "unzip -a". Our data set contains 250 monthly, time-series observations from January 1979 to October 1999 organized as a 250 x 11 table of data where each row is a year:month combination and each column is an identifier or a variable. The variables are in the following order: id pm pc pi q r sc si vc vi w where id = the identifier; pm = real Canadian $ Madison's lumber price series; pc = real Canadian $ coastal lumber price series; pi = real Canadian $ interior lumber price series; q = average rate of return to two publicly-traded lumber firms; r = real price for electricity; sc = real Canadian $ average coastal stumpage rate; si = real Canadian $ average coastal stumpage rate; vc = volume of timber harvested on coast; vi = volume of timber harvested in the interior; w = real Canadian $ wage for median IWA contract. Below, we describe in detail the identifier and each variable. =============================================================================== id =============================================================================== The identifier is defined to be id = 1 for January 1979 and is incremented by 1 each month thereafter. Thus, for October 1999, id = 250. =============================================================================== pm, pc, and pi =============================================================================== We have employed two different kinds of lumber-price series in this research. The first lumber-price series, pm, we have chosen to use in valuing output is the real, average-monthly price per thousand board feet (1Mfbm) for one box car of Western, Kiln-Dried (KD), Spruce-Pine-Fir (SPF), 2x4s, Standard and Better (Std & Btr), Random Lengths (R/L). The series was contructed from weekly reports in the trade publication Madison's Canadian Lumber Reporter, weekly issues, January 1979 to October 1999. This price series is listed as ``less 5 & 2 percent'' discounts, and is free-on-board (FOB) mill. Moreover, it is quoted in nominal U.S. dollars. To convert the series into Canadian dollars we used the Canadian/U.S. spot exchange rate from the CANSIM database, matrix 933, series B40001. We converted nominal price data into real terms by dividing by the Canadian Consumer Price Index (CPI) setting January 1999 to one. This units of this series are $/Mbfm. Because the Madison's price series, pm, aggregates coastal and interior lumber and because these two products could have different economic prices, we sought finer, disaggregated data. Thus, we also used in the bulk of our analysis price indices for coastal and interior timber constructed by Statistics Canada, which are denoted pc and pi. These data are from matrix 1873 and are series P2452 and P2448. For comparability, we have normalized these indices so that the average of pm is the average of the harvested-volume weighted average of pc and pi; i.e., we have scaled the pc and pi series by a factor of 2.7492. =============================================================================== q =============================================================================== The rental rates on capital were calculated using an average of the returns for two prominent timber firms' stock price series: Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific collected from the financial database at yahoo.com which has the following URL: http://finance.yahoo.com The series contain monthly open/close prices for the stocks, a return per month was calculated as the percentage change in these prices over every month of the sample period. We then created the series q as the average of the two return series. =============================================================================== r =============================================================================== The data for industrial electricity prices in British Columbia are from Statistics Canada, matrix 9950, series P110042. =============================================================================== sc and si =============================================================================== The stumpage-rate data were supplied to us by the British Columbia Ministry of Forests and were taken from its administrative database. =============================================================================== vc and vi =============================================================================== From the Harvest Database of the Ministry of Forests, we acquired the monthly volumes of scaled timber by region. =============================================================================== w =============================================================================== The data for hourly wages were supplied to us by the Industrial Woodworkers of America (IWA) and were taken from Article VII of the union's contracts with the lumber industry for each year from 1979 to 1999. We used the nominal hourly wage for (pay) grade level 14, the median of the pay grades, calculating the real hourly wage by deflating using the CPI. =============================================================================== For additional questions, please contact me at Harry J. Paarsch Department of Economics Henry B. Tippie College of Business 108 Pappajohn Business Building University of Iowa 21 East Market Street Iowa City, IA 52242-1000 USA Telephone: (319) 335-0936 Facsimile: (319) 335-1956 e-mail: hjp@paarsch.biz.uiowa.edu