Samuelson on Forest Economics: An Inadvertent Tribute to Faustmann, and a Few Others

Paul Samuelson’s 1976 paper is one of the most cited in the whole literature of forest economics. Google Scholar listed 472 citations. Hartman’s paper on optimal rotation, appearing in the same journal in the same year, also claims 472. But an earlier discussion of the same subject by Bentley and Teeguarden (1965) had 72 citations, and a later review by Newman (2002), 42. This intensity of citation seems strange for a work whose main innovative feature was, on the face of it, the name on the author line.