Eastern Oregon's Lumber and Stumpage Markets. Abstract Approved:

The first objective of this research is to develop primal and dual models of firm behavior that incorporate firms ' conjectures of their market power positions. The second is to empirically test for the presence of market power in eastern Oregon's stumpage and lumber markets. Eastern Oregon was chosen since it has historically been a relatively self-supplied stumpage region, mostly from public lands, and because much of the supply contains tree species that possess characteristics that allow for the production of unique products. Additionally, supply will likely increase in the future as public land management agencies implement plans to restore ecosystem health to the region. The model development and estimation methods use the procedures of the relatively new discipline called the "new empirical industrial organization " (NEIO). NEIO uses theoretical results of profit maximizing behavior to econometrically estimatethe amount by which industry behavior deviates from perfect competition. In particular, this research utilizes input and output shadow prices to derive firms ' conjectural elasticities, which are then directly estimated using nonlinear two-stage and three-stage least squares. The results of the empirical estimations, although not conclusive, indicate that competitiv