Haldane's asymptotics for supercritical branching processes in an iid random environment

Abstract

Branching processes in a random environment are natural generalisations of Galton-Watson processes. In this paper we analyse the asymptotic decay of the survival probability for a sequence of slightly supercritical branching processes in an iid random environment, where the offspring expectation converges from above to $1$. We prove that Haldane's asymptotics, known from classical Galton-Watson processes, turns up again in the random environment case, provided that one stays away from the critical/subcritical regime. A central building block is a connection to and a limit theorem for perpetuities with asymptotically vanishing interest rates.