Fisheries Production: Management Institutions, Spatial Choice, and the Quest for Policy Invariance

The fishery-dependent data used to estimate fishing production technologies are shaped by the incentive structures that influence fishermen’s purposeful choices across their multiple margins of production. Using a combination of analytical and simulation methods, we demonstrate how market prices and regulatory institutions influence a dominant short-run margin of production—the deployment of fishing time over space. We show that institutionally driven spatial selection leads to only a partial exploration of the full production set, yielding poorly identified estimates of production possibilities outside of the institutionally dependent status quo. The implication is that many estimated fisheries production functions suffer from a lack of policy invariance and may yield misleading predictions for even the most short-run of policy evaluation tasks. Our findings suggest that accurate assessment of the impacts of a policy intervention requires a description of the fishing production process that is sufficiently structural so as to be invariant to institutional changes.Ye

Mechanisms matter for evaluating the economic impacts of marine reserves

Large areas of marine and coastal environments have been protected to satisfy diverse policy goals, but there has been limited work understanding the economic impacts of such closures. While methods for establishing causal impacts are prevalent, less attention has been paid to explaining the mechanisms through which the causal relationship came to be. Understanding mechanisms is crucial for designing policies that foster the mechanisms that achieve the intended objectives of marine reserves and mitigate the mechanisms that do not. We estimate the treatment effect of a large marine reserve on the net earnings of a commercial fishery using difference-in-differences and synthetic-control designs, and decompose the treatment effect into its constituent mechanisms through structural equation modeling. We find minimal evidence that closing the marine reserve to fishing had a significant economic cost for the industry; however, several counteracting mechanisms are critical for explaining the effect and for generalizing to other settings

Unraveling the Multiple Margins of Rent Generation from Individual Transferable Quotas

"Unraveling the Multiple Margins of Rent Generation from Individual Transferable Quotas." International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade's 16th Biennial Conference, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, July 16-20, 201

Technology or Incentives? Bycatch Avoidance in the BSAI Groundfish Fishery

Technology or Incentives? Bycatch Avoidance in the BSAI Groundfish Fishery. Forum of the North American Association of Fisheries Economists, St. Petersburg, FL, May 23, 2013

ACES High or Low? The Impact of a Severance Tax Change on Alaskan Oil Activity

ACES High or Low? The Impact of a Severance Tax Change on Alaskan Oil Activity. Western Regional Science Association, San Diego, CA, February 18, 2014

Bycatch Avoidance Under Amendment 80 in the BSAI Non-Pollock Groundfish Trawl Fishery

Bycatch Avoidance Under Amendment 80 in the BSAI Non-Pollock Groundfish Trawl Fishery. Lowell Wakefield Fisheries Symposium, Anchorage, AK, May 13-16, 2014

Alaskan fishing community revenues and the stabilizing role of fishing portfolios

Alaskan fishing community revenues and the stabilizing role of fishing portfolios, in Marine Policy, September 201

Multiple Margins of Fishing Behavior: Implications for Predicting the Effects of a Policy Change

This presentation provides an extensive overview of the analysis and findings of studies of policy change in fishing management. It concludes that "Accurate assessment of the impacts of a policy requires a description of the production process that is sufficiently “deep” so as to be invariant to changes in management institutions". Search for "Hidden Flexibility: Institutions, Incentives, and the Margins of Selectivity in Fishing" for more details on this research