Stochastic Optimal Control of Hawkes Jump-Diffusion Systems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to developing a framework for stochastic growth models with environmental risk, in which rare but catastrophic shocks interact with capital accumulation and pollution. Building on the Poisson point process formulation studied in arXiv:2511.13568, we extend the model to disasters driven by a marked Hawkes process, allowing past disasters to temporarily increase the likelihood of subsequent shocks. Our work focuses on a subcritical Markovian Hawkes specification, in which the state space is augmented by the self-excitation component of disaster risk. We establish the well-posedness and nonexplosion of the resulting controlled Hawkes dynamics. Using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman characterization of the corresponding Poisson control problem, we obtain quantitative estimates for the Hawkes excitation process and prove, under a small-excitation scaling, that the Hawkes value function converges to its Poisson counterpart as the magnitude of self-excitation vanishes. This provides a rigorous Poisson approximation of the stochastic control problem and quantifies the effect of self-excitation on optimal growth under environmental disaster risk.