Empirical Models of Fisheries Production: Conflating Technology with Incentives?

Details

• Journal Title:
  Marine Resource Economics
• Personal Author:
  Reimer, Matthew N. ; Abbott, Joshua K. ; Haynie, Alan C.
• NOAA Program & Office:
  NMFS (National Marine Fisheries Service)
• Description:
  Conventional empirical models of fisheries production inadequately capture the primary margins of behavior along which fishermen act, rendering them ineffective for ex ante policy evaluation. We estimate a conventional production model for a fishery undergoing a transition to rights-based management and show that ex ante production data alone arrives at misleading conclusions regarding post-rationalization production possibilities—even though the technologies available to fishermen before and after rationalization were effectively unchanged. Our results emphasize the difficulty of assessing the potential impacts of a policy change on the basis of ex ante data alone. Since such data are generated under a different incentive structure than the prospective system, a purely empirical approach imposed upon a flexible functional form is likely to reflect far more about the incentives under status-quo management than the actual technological possibilities under a new policy regime.
• Source:
  Marine Resource Economics, 32(2), 169-190
• DOI:
  https://doi.org/10.1086/690677
• ISSN:
  0738-1360 ; 2334-5985
• Format:
  pdf
• Publisher:
  University of Chicago Press
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Rights Information:
  Other
• Compliance:
  Library
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:ae34e33aa9427cb5b995a9e4149f39966d5850095d250f2128652c136dcc3795b886cbc9af8a370905918161eb3cdfcee3013d771dff18e0721cd06091210e3d
• Download URL:
  https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/68870/noaa_68870_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 705.66 KB ]