Branching processes in nearly degenerate varying environment

Abstract

We investigate branching processes in varying environment, for which $\overline{f}_n \to 1$ and $\sum_{n=1}^\infty (1-\overline{f}_n)_+ = \infty$ , $\sum_{n=1}^\infty (\overline{f}_n - 1)_+ < \infty$ , where $\overline{f}_n$ stands for the offspring mean in generation n. Since subcritical regimes dominate, such processes die out almost surely, therefore to obtain a nontrivial limit we consider two scenarios: conditioning on nonextinction, and adding immigration. In both cases we show that the process converges in distribution without normalization to a nondegenerate compound-Poisson limit law. The proofs rely on the shape function technique, worked out by Kersting (2020).