The Covid-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented increase in the U.S. price of softwood lumber by more than 300%. The reasons for this increase have been attributed to constraints on supply caused by pandemic-induced labor shortages, and increased demand for lumber caused by a Covid-19 related boom in domestic real estate and home improvements. In this paper, we examine the effect that these factors might have had on the increase in prices and the related changes in the welfare of U.S. lumber manufacturers and downstream users of lumber. We examine three cases where the demand function shifts outwards: (1) the lumber supply function remains unchanged; (2) the U.S. lumber supply function and that of its trading partners shifts inwards; and (3) U.S. lumber producers restrict output at its pre-Covid level. Overall, we find that U.S. producers gained between $0.7 and $8.0 billion per quarter as a result of the pandemic, while downstream processors gained $639 million. We argue, however, that the ultimate consumer of the downstream products that require lumber as an input (housing construction, furniture) might well be worse off as surplus lost as a result of reduced expenditures on commodities and services restricted by Covid-19 are not quite recovered when spending switches to lumber-related commodities.

Covid-19 大流行导致美国软木价格空前上涨 300% 以上。造成这种增长的原因是大流行引起的劳动力短缺导致供应受限，以及 Covid-19 相关的国内房地产和房屋装修繁荣导致对木材的需求增加。在本文中，我们研究了这些因素可能对价格上涨产生的影响以及美国木材制造商和木材下游用户福利的相关变化。我们考察了需求函数向外移动的三种情况：（1）木材供应函数保持不变；(2) 美国及其贸易伙伴的木材供应功能向内转移；(3) 美国木材生产商将产量限制在 Covid 之前的水平。总的来说，我们发现美国 由于大流行，生产商每季度获利 0.7 至 80 亿美元，而下游加工商则获利 6.39 亿美元。然而，我们认为，需要木材作为投入品（房屋建筑、家具）的下游产品的最终消费者的处境可能会更糟，因为 Covid-19 限制的商品和服务支出减少而导致的剩余损失并不当支出转向与木材相关的商品时，相当恢复。