The optimal harvesting of environmental bads

Our analysis molds two traditional approaches to promoting quality. The first is restoring the stock of quality. The second is curbing its flow of deterioration. Although both approaches are widely used in real world settings, analytic models have tended to focus on one strategy or the other. We consider a class of problems, which we call “SFQ” problems, in which both stocks and flows can be controlled to promote quality. We develop our results in the context of environmental quality, drawing on real-world examples from atomic wastes to zebra mussels. But the lessons are general, and we show how they apply to promoting the quality of both physical and human capital