Research
Job Market Paper
Landowner Expectations of Wildfire Risk Have Accelerated Harvest, Reduced Volume, and Altered Fuel Loads in Western U.S. Forests
with Christopher Mihiar and David J. Lewis
Abstract. Wildfire risk has intensified across the western United States, generating hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damages each year. Economic theory shows that changing wildfire risk should induce landowners to reduce risk exposure through forest management, though there is little empirical evidence of such landowner adaptation. This study provides the first large-scale empirical evidence on how increasing wildfire risk affects plot-level forest management decisions on non-federal land. Using confidential plot-level data from the U.S.D.A. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis program linked with wildfire perimeters and fire-related weather conditions, we examine how nearby wildfires and hotter, drier fire seasons influence the choice among harvest types and decisions regarding planting density on private and state timberland in Oregon, California, and Washington. Controlling for plot and climate factors, we find that increased wildfire exposure and a warmer, drier climate lead landowners to harvest more and to lower their planting densities, revealing adaptive responses to changing fire risk consistent with predictions from natural resource economic theory. A bio-economic simulation shows that landowner adaptation to the changing fire regime since 2001 has reduced standing volume in non-federal western forests by roughly 7 to 10 percent. We quantify two of the externalities that landowner adaptation created on observed wildfires from 2020 and 2024. Holding observed fires fixed, adaptation’s impact on tree volume, surface fuels and crown fuels raised PM2.5 emissions which resulted in damages from the 2020 fire season of $63 to $72 million, which outweighed the lower CO2 emissions of $28 to $58 million.
Working paper — not peer reviewed; please do not cite. This version: September 30, 2026 (revisions in progress).
Selected Works in Progress
Does Private Forest Management Change Wildfire Spread and Severity?
with David J. Lewis
Measuring the Fuel Effects of Forest Management and Fuel Treatments
with David J. Lewis
Do Public Fuels Treatments Crowd Out or Complement Private Forest Fuel Treatments?
with Christopher Mihiar and Alice Favero
Forest Yields Under Climate Change: Do Machine-Learning and Conventional Models Diverge?
with David J. Lewis