BREEDING INCENTIVE PROGRAMS AND DEMAND FOR CALIFORNIA THOROUGHBRED RACING: THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN QUANTITY AND QUALITY

Both quantity of horses and quality stimulate demand for horse race gambling. This paper addresses the potential for a quantity/quality tradeoff due to breeding incentives for California thoroughbreds. Econometric analysis is used to assess the demand for quality and quantity of horses, and results suggest the likely net benefit of breeding incentives on the industry at large.Livestock Production/Industries,

Endogenous Fishing Mortality in Life History Models: Relaxing Some Implicit Assumptions

Life history models can include a wide range of biological and ecological features that affect exploited fish populations. However, they typically treat fishing mortality as an exogenous parameter. Implicitly, this approach assumes that the supply of fishing effort is perfectly inelastic. That is, the supply curve of effort is vertical. Fishery modelers often run simulations for different values of fishing mortality, but his exercise also assumes vertical supply and simply explores a series of these curves as different scenarios. The seemingly innocuous assumption of vertical supply conflicts with a large body of empirical work on behavior of fishermen and fishing fleets. Economists and fisheries scientists consistently find that fishing behavior is responsive to economic opportunities over time and space as well as across target species. Accounting for this phenomenon requires that fishing mortality be made endogenous. This paper demonstrates an approach to endogenizing fishing mortality in life history models by allowing the fish stock in the previous period and other behavioral drivers to enter into the equation that predicts fishing effort in the next period. The paper discusses conditions under which the standard approach is approximately accurate and when endogenous fishing mortality dramatically alters model predictions. An empirical application to the Gulf of Mexico gag, a species of grouper, illustrates the importance of endogenizing fishing mortality. Accounting for fishing behavior ultimately will improve predictions from management models and avoid fisheries management failures.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

SPATIAL SEARCH IN COMMERCIAL FISHING: A DISCRETE CHOICE DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING APPROACH

We specify a discrete choice dynamic programming model of commercial fishing participation and location choices. This approach allows us to examine how fishermen collect information about resource abundance and whether their behavior is forward-looking.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Surviving Slavery. Mortality at Mesopotamia, a Jamaican sugar estate, 1762 - 1832

We use survival analysis to study the mortality experience of 1111 slaves living on the British West Indian sugar plantation of Mesopotamia for seven decades prior to the Emancipation Act of 1833. Using three different concepts of analysis time and employing non-parametric and semi-parametric models, our results suggest that female slaves first observed under Joseph Foster Barham II's period of ownership (1789-1832) faced an increased hazard of death compared with those first observed during his predecessor's tenure. We find no such relationship for males. We cite as a possible explanation the employment regime operated by Foster Barham II, which allocated increasing numbers of females to gang labour in the cane fields. A G-estimation model used to compensate for the 'healthy worker survivor effect' estimates that continuous exposure to such work reduced survival times by between 20 and 40 per cent. Our findings are compared with previous studies of Mesopotamia and related to the wider literature investigating the roles of fertility and mortality in undermining the sustainability of Caribbean slave populations.

Sorting Models in Discrete Choice Fisheries Analysis

One of the greatest challenges facing empirical fisheries researchers is to endogenize fishing effort in bioeconomic models in a way that accounts for fleet heterogeneity. Such heterogeneity can manifest in a wide range of both observable and unobservable characteristics of fishing vessels and individual fishermen. Without accounting for heterogeneity, we simply have an incomplete understanding of how pressure on fish resources responds to policy instruments that are available, the states of fish stocks, and exogenous shocks to the system. Largely due to data limitations, the discrete choice fisheries literature has focused on modeling unobserved heterogeneity through random parameters. In this paper, we draw on the industrial organization literature on product differentiation and the public economics literature on spatial sorting to estimate sorting models of observable heterogeneity. Models of this type estimate individual-specific structural coefficients based on observable individual characteristics and choice-specific constants using contraction mapping. We apply the methods to location choices and target species choices in the Gulf of Mexico reef-fish fishery. For this application, we have an unusual data set that couples daily observations from logbooks with demographic information from a mail survey of captains. We use contraction mapping to control for spatially-, and species-explicit stock information. The models are used to explore spatial and inter-temporal species effort substitution in response to two marine reserves, which are implemented in sample.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

TROPHIC PORTFOLIOS IN MARINE FISHERIES: A STEP TOWARDS ECOSYSTEM MANAGEMENT

Marine ecologists warn that humans are "fishing down marine food webs." To explore the economic implications of this phenomenon, this paper applies portfolio theory to aggregate fisheries data. It poses two definitions of a sustainable mean-variance catch frontier. It computes a mean-variance frontier for catch using UNFAO historical fisheries data. Finally, the paper discusses the historical trend in inefficiency.Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

ANALYSIS OF A SPATIAL ROTATION PLAN FOR THE TULE LAKE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE

This paper examines the joint agro-wildfowl regulation of the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in California. The area is jointly managed by the Bureau of Reclamation for both farming and wildfowl benefits. Production in both sectors has been declining recently, in farming due to nematode and soil pathogen buildup and in wildfowl production due to climax vegetation choking the lake. A novel spatial rotation plan has surfaced to solve both problems. We develop a simple model of the rotation option to identify critical variables and then we estimate some of these using data on lease bids.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Valuing Ecosystem Services with Fishery Rents: A Lumped-Parameter Approach to Hypoxia in the Neuse River Estuary

Valuing ecosystem services with microeconomic underpinnings presents challenges because these services typically constitute nonmarket values and contribute to human welfare indirectly through a series of ecological pathways that are dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to quantify and link to appropriate economic spatial and temporal scales. This paper develops and demonstrates a method to value a portion of ecosystem services when a commercial fishery is dependent on the quality of estuarine habitat. Using a lumped-parameter, dynamic open access bioeconomic model that is spatially explicit and includes predator-prey interactions, this paper quantifies part of the value of improved ecosystem function in the Neuse River Estuary when nutrient pollution is reduced. Specifically, it traces the effects of nitrogen loading on the North Carolina commercial blue crab fishery by modeling the response of primary production and the subsequent impact on hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen). Hypoxia, in turn, affects blue crabs and their preferred prey. The discounted present value fishery rent increase from a 30% reduction in nitrogen loadings in the Neuse is $2.56 million, though this welfare estimate is fairly sensitive to some parameter values. Surprisingly, this number is not sensitive to initial conditions.Open access, Predator-prey, Hypoxia, Habitat-dependent fisheries

MARINE RESERVES WITH ENDOGENOUS PORTS: EMPIRICAL BIOECONOMICS OF THE CALIFORNIA SEA URCHIN FISHERY

Marine reserves are gaining substantial public support as tools for commercial fisheries management Harvest sector responses will influence policy performance, yet biological studies often depict harvester behavior as spread uniformly over fishing grounds and unresponsive to economic opportunities. Previous bioeconomic analyses show that these behavioral assumptions are inconsistent with empirical data and, more importantly, lead to overly optimistic predictions about harvest gains from reserves. This paper adds another layer of behavioral realism to the bioeconomics of marine reserves by endogenizing fisher home port choices with a partial adjustment share model. Estimated with Seemingly Unrelated Regression over monthly data, this approach allows simulation of both short- and long-run behavioral response to changes induced by marine reserve formation. The findings cast further doubt on the notion that marine reserves generate long-run harvest benefits.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Structural Modeling of Marine Reserves with Bayesian Estimation

Structural models can assess the effectiveness of fishery management prospectively and retrospectively. However, when only fishery-dependent data are available, structural econometric models are highly nonlinear in the parameters, and maximum likelihood and other extremum-based estimators can fail to converge. As a solution to these estimation challenges, we adapt Bayesian econometric methods to estimate a dynamic structural model of marine reserve formation. Using simulated data, we find that our approach is able to recover structural biological and economic parameters that classical estimation procedures fail to recover. We apply the approach to real data from the Gulf of Mexico reef-fish fishery. We test the effects of the Steamboat Lumps Marine Reserve on population growth and catchability for gag, a species of grouper. We find that after four years, the reserve has neither produced statistically significant losses in sustainable yield nor statistically significant gains in biological production.Marine reserves, marine protected areas, Bayesian econometrics, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Environmental Economics and Policy, C11, Q22,