On sustainability and intergenerational transfers with a renewable resource

Recent papers have examined sustainability in overlapping generations models with a nonrenewable resource or a renewable resource with a fixed rate of regeneration. When the regeneration of the resource depends upon the resource stock, a competitive economy can generate a variety of outcomes, from resource exhaustion to inefficient overaccumulation, depending upon the value of key parameters. Output shares, private discount factor, intergenerational transfers, and labor supply when old affect the steady-state equilibrium and therefore the implied social rate of time preference. In some cases, a nondecreasing utility requirement can be Pareto inefficient. (JEL Q20).