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Many rights‐based systems in fisheries use individual fishing quotas (IFQs) that allocate shares of total allowable catch to individual fishers, vessels, or groups of fishers. We analyze the performance of IFQs in the Norwegian coastal groundfish fisheries that substantially limit transferability. We use data from two similar fishing groups that were treated with different management. Difference‐in‐differences results show that IFQs increase productivity and prices for some of the main groundfish species. Results suggest that expected productivity gains and price gains from first‐best rights‐based policies that create highly transferable IFQs can result from second‐best policies that substantially limit transferability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rights-based management of fishery resources theoretically allows firms to minimize the cost of extraction without the threat that other harvesters will take their allocations, but added flexibility also allows firms to exploit revenue margins such that firms balance potential revenuegains with potential cost savings. Using two approaches, difference-in-differences with an index of seafood prices and synthetic control, we test for revenue gains in 39 US fisheries that adopted market-based regulations and find mixed evidence of price increases. Species with price increases tend to have viable fresh markets or other features that discourage gluts, whereas species with price decreases plausibly have more to gain on thecost side or are part of a multispecies complex with a higher-value species experiencing a price increase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing recognition that fisheries should be managed for all three pillars of sustainability: economic, social and environmental sustainability. Limited quantitative evidence exists on factors supporting social sustainability, much less factors that contribute to multiple dimensions of sustainability. To develop a broader understanding of the factors that influence the performance of fishery management systems in environmental, economic and social pillars, we examine 11 input factors conjectured to contribute to successful fisheries using a global dataset of 145 fisheries case studies. The analysis indicates that management approaches are cross‐cutting and contribute to multiple dimensions of sustainability to varying extents. Importantly, factors exogenous to fisheries management can be as important as fisheries management, suggesting collaboration of fisheries institutions with other public and private institutions is important for sustainable fisheries development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercial fishing decisions about where to land and sell catches have important efficiency and distributional implications for fishing communities. Unlike fishing location choices, landing locations choices have received little attention. We develop a model of fishers' landing sites in northern Norway. While fishers are highly responsive to travel distance, we find that expected revenues are a lesser driver of landing location choices. Rather, choices are dominated by strong state dependence, and most vessels always land at the same port. These results suggest that economic policies designed to redistribute landings in order to aid certain communities would not necessarily draw fishers away from their preferred landing sites. On the other hand, the responsiveness of some fishers to intraseasonal stock movements offers a glimpse of how climate change could reshape the spatial equilibria of landings and seafood production in years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As more no-take marine reserves are established, the importance of evaluating effectiveness retrospectively Is growing. This paper adapts methods from program evaluation to quantify the effects of establishing a [...]

Fishery collapse has been defined as a fishery with annual landings less than 10% of the historic maximum observed catch. However, this 10% rule is not grounded in bioeconomic theory despite being widely used in empirical economic studies of fisheries. We assess the 10% rule by simulating fisheries under pure open access, open access with cost changes, open access with critical depensation, optimal management (both deterministic and stochastic cases), and rebuilding plans. We show that the 10% rule generates false negatives and false positives, and that the prevalence of these problems varies under different institutional configurations, economic incentives, and biological conditions. We urge researchers to abandon this outcome measure for comparative empirical tests and encourage more research on collapse that attends to human agency and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fishers face multidimensional decisions: when to fish, what species to target, and how much gear to deploy. Most bioeconomic models assume single-species fisheries with perfectly elastic demand and focus on inter-seasonal dynamics. In real-world fisheries, vessels hold quotas for multiple species with heterogeneous biological and/or market conditions that vary intra-seasonally. We analyze within-season behavior in multispecies fisheries with individual fishing quotas, accounting for stock aggregations, capacity constraints, and downward-sloping demand. Numerical results demonstrate variation in harvest patterns. We specifically find: (1) harvests for species with downward-sloping demand tend to spread out; (2) spreading harvest of a high-value species can cause lower-value species to be harvested earlier in the season; and (3) harvest can be unresponsive or even respond negatively to biological aggregation when fishers balance incentives in multispecies settings. We test these using panel data from the Norwegian multispecies groundfish fishery and find evidence for all three. We extend the numerical model to account for transitions to management with individual fishing quotas in multispecies fisheries. We show that, under some circumstances, fishing seasons could contract or spread out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions about global aquaculture production and prospects for future growth largely focus on Asia, where most global production takes place. Countries in Asia accounted for about 89% of global production in 2016. Exclusive attention to Asian aquaculture, however, overlooks the fact that "the blue revolution" is occurring in most parts of the world. This paper examines patterns in the development of aquaculture production by analyzing growth rates across the globe at the regional, species and country levels. The results show that production in some non-Asian countries is growing more rapidly than the major Asian producers. Moreover, most developed countries have played a limited role in the blue revolution despite being leading producers as late as the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Deviation from Nash behavior manifests as behavioral responses to property rights regimes. • A non-parametric test can detect and quantify behavioral responses. • An individual fishing vessel quota policy shifts behavior away from the tragedy of the commons. Commons problems present behavioral dilemmas, with tensions between individual and collective rationality. When users of a common-pool resource are not effectively excluded, the collective behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interests dissipates economic surplus. We derive a non-parametric test of whether individuals' collective behavior in resource extraction is consistent with the canonical commons model, namely Nash tragedy-of-the-commons behavior. Our approach allows for an arbitrarily concave, differentiable production function of total inputs and for heterogeneous agents with arbitrarily convex, differentiable costs of supplying inputs. We extend the test to allow for unobserved total output. We also define distance from the data to the model and develop statistical tests using the distance metric. Applying our approach to panel data of Norwegian commercial fishing vessels, we find the results of our test are consistent with the economic intuition that, in the absence of property rights, tragedy-of-the-commons behavior dissipates surplus. Significantly, we find property rights reforms move firms away from Nash tragedy-of-the-commons behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the widespread implementation of catch shares (i.e. rights-based fisheries management) at the end of the twentieth century, economists have begun to examine empirical evidence about their performance. Yet despite documented positive outcomes and predicted gains from wider adoption of this approach, catch shares face persistent political opposition and criticism in the noneconomics literature. The debate surrounding catch shares focuses on equity, industry consolidation, nonlocal ownership of quotas, employment, and other impacts on fishing communities, but the evidence on both sides has been largely anecdotal. To inform this debate, it is important for economists and other researchers to produce rigorous analyses that quantify the effects of catch shares on employment, the distribution of economic value in the harvest and processing sectors, and other indicators of community well-being. We assess catch shares to identify research needs and guide policymakers. Using examples from the experiences of the United States and Argentina with rights-based fisheries, we demonstrate that a key challenge for researchers and policymakers is accounting for multiple species, globalization of seafood markets, and climate change. We urge policymakers to consider these forces and their impacts, along with available empirical evidence, when evaluating fisheries management options that balance efficiency and equity goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability of global fisheries is a growing concern. The United Nations has identified three pillars of sustainability: economic development, social development, and environmental protection. The fisheries literature suggests that there are two key trade-offs among these pillars of sustainability. First, poor ecological health of a fishery reduces economic profits for fishers, and second, economic profitability of individual fishers undermines the social objectives of fishing communities. Although recent research has shown that management can reconcile ecological and economic objectives, there are lingering concerns about achieving positive social outcomes. We examined trade-offs among the three pillars of sustainability by analyzing the Fishery Performance Indicators, a unique dataset that scores 121 distinct fishery systems worldwide on 68 metrics categorized by social, economic, or ecological outcomes. For each of the 121 fishery systems, we averaged the outcome measures to create overall scores for economic, ecological, and social performance. We analyzed the scores and found that they were positively associated in the full sample. We divided the data into subsamples that correspond to fisheries management systems with three categories of access--open access, access rights, and harvest rights--and performed a similar analysis. Our results show that economic, social, and ecological objectives are at worst independent and are mutually reinforcing in both types of managed fisheries. The implication is that rights-based management systems should not be rejected on the basis of potentially negative social outcomes; instead, social considerations should be addressed in the design of these systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the overexploitation of the North Pacific Fur Seal. Topics discussed include development of resource and fisheries economics, generalization of the Gordon model of open access, and a predator-prey model with a human predator for establishing resource economics as an empirical science.

Some classical economists, most notably Malthus, predicted that scarcity would undermine long-term human well-being. John Stuart Mill, in contrast, predicted that the threat of scarcity creates incentives for innovation that help to avoid some of the worst outcomes. Popular claims of marine ecologists often apply the Malthusian narrative to supplies of seafood, yet global supplies have continued to grow. We examine the modern seafood industry and evaluate Mill’s claims about innovation. We argue that the mechanisms that Mill discusses–innovation in response to and in anticipation of scarcity–account for much of what we see. Scarcities induce technological, policy, and market innovations that enable seafood supplies to grow, and these innovations can build on each other. The challenge for policy makers is to avoid knee-jerk responses to Malthusian narratives and craft policy responses that encourage innovation while recognizing physical limits of ocean resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Community-supported fisheries (CSF) projects show signs of rapid growth. Modeled on community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects, CSFs share objectives of reducing social and physical distance between consumers and producers and re-embedding food systems in social and environmental contexts. This article offers a comparison of CSF and CSA, situated in the differences between seafood and agricultural products, and fishing and farming. We draw on economic and resource theory, past research on CSA, and a member survey from a case study CSF. Survey results show CSF members are interested in accessing high-quality, fresh, local seafood, and in supporting fishing communities, and they believe that participating in a CSF achieves both. They are less certain that a CSF can address environmental concerns, and few identify environmental motives as their primary reason for participating. The latter contrasts with CSA research results, and we contextualize these findings in our broader comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Seafood is widely considered to be either fished or farmed. In contrast to this perception, many types of seafood are produced by enterprises using a combination of techniques traditionally ascribed to either fisheries or aquaculture. Categorizing seafood as either fished or farmed obfuscates the growth potential and environmental impacts of global seafood production. To better capture seafood data, national and international record-keeping organizations should add a new hybrid category for seafood produced using both fisheries and aquaculture methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

U.S. federal law calls for an end to overfishing, but measuring overfishing requires knowledge of bioeconomic parameters. Using microlevel economic data from the commercial fishery, this paper proposes a two-stage approach to estimate these parameters for a generalized fishery model. In the first stage, a fishery production function is consistently estimated by a within-period estimator treating the latent stock as a fixed effect. The estimated stock is then substituted into an equation of fish stock dynamics to estimate all other biological parameters. The bootstrap approach is used to correct the standard errors in the two-stage model. This method is applied to the reef-fish fishery in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico. The traditional method, which uses catch-per-unit-effort as a stock proxy, significantly overstates the optimal harvest level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Spatial-dynamic processes in renewable resource economics pose difficult conceptual, analytical, empirical, and institutional challenges that are distinct from either spatial or dynamic problems. We describe the challenges and conceptual approaches using both continuous and discrete depictions of space and summarize key findings. Using a metapopulation model of the fishery and simulated economic and ecological data, we show that it is possible in certain circumstances to recover both biological and economic parameters of a linked spatial-dynamic system from only economic data. We illustrate the application empirically with data from the Gulf of Mexico reef-fish fishery. We conclude with a discussion of key policy and institutional design issues involved in managing spatial-dynamic systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Economics of the fishery has focused on the wastefulness of common pool resource exploitation. Pure open access fisheries dissipate economic rents and degrade biological stocks. Biologically managed fisheries also dissipate rents but are thought to hold biological stocks at desired levels. We develop and estimate an empirical bioeconomic model of the Gulf of Mexico gag fishery that questions the presumptive success of biological management. Unlike previous bioeconomic life history studies, we provide a way to circumvent calibration problems by embedding our estimation routine directly in the dynamic bioeconomic model. We nest a standard biological management model that accounts for complex life history characteristics of the gag. Biological intuition suggests that a spawning season closure will reduce fishing pressure and increase stocks, and simulations of the biological management model confirm this finding. However, simulations of the empirical bioeconomic model suggest that these intended outcomes of the spawning closure do not materialize. The behavioral response to the closure appears to be so pronounced that it offsets the restriction in allowable fishing days. Our results indicate that failure to account for fishing behavior may play an important role in fishery management failures. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper models dynamic producer and consumer benefits from improving habitat that supports the North Carolina blue crab fishery. It embeds two fishery management institutions--open access and partial rationalization in a multispecies, two-patch spatial bioeconomic model with endogenous output price and estuarine eutrophication. Producer benefits from improved environmental quality are higher for the rationalized fishery than for open access. Consumer benefits are larger than producer benefits and are comparable across institutions. However, the total benefits from improving environmental quality are small relative to the benefits from rationalizing the fishery and leaving environmental quality the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore the distinction between state dependence and heterogeneity in repeated decisions, this paper combines a Mixed Logit model with a state dependence parameterization from the marketing literature to study fishing location choices of commercial sea urchin divers in California. It examines implications of ignoring either effect and finds in all cases that true state dependence is an important determinant of location choice. Consequently, spatial policies like marine reserves can lead to differences in the short- and long-run behavioral responses of the fishing fleet. Under some specifications, random preference parameters are statistically significant when state dependence is excluded from the model, but when it is included, random preference parameters are not significant. In other specifications, including state dependence only dampens the variability in preference parameters. These results highlight the importance of gathering and analyzing diary-type data for commercial fisheries as well as for similar choice problems in recreation demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine biologists have shown virtually unqualified support for managing fisheries with marine reserves, signifying a new resource management paradigm that recognizes the importance of spatial processes in exploited systems. Most modeling of reserves employs simplifying assumptions about the behavior of fishermen in response to spatial closures. We show that a realistic depiction of fishermen behavior dramatically alters the conclusions about reserves. We develop, estimate, and calibrate an integrated bioeconomic model of the sea urchin fishery in northern California and use it to simulate reserve policies. Our behavioral model shows how economic incentives determine both participation and location choices of fishermen. We compare simulations with behavioral response to biological modeling that presumes that effort is spatially uniform and unresponsive to economic incentives. We demonstrate that optimistic conclusions about reserves may be an artifact of simplifying assumptions that ignore economic behavior. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper analyzes spatial patterns of exploitation in the California sea urchin fishery using two different econometric approaches: a combined count data and SUR model of monthly observations and a micro-level Nested Logit model of individual harvester daily deci- sions. Each model is used to simulate the spatial distribution of fishing effort. The models are compared using goodness of fit measures and implications for management are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing pathogens is a challenge in biological production processes. To manage private risks and reduce externalities, biological controls leverage the technology of natural ecosystems and are often considered environmentally friendly alternatives to chemical controls. In salmon farming, parasitic sea lice reduce own-firm profitability by stressing fish and slowing growth and generate externalities by spreading to neighboring farms and threatening wild fish populations. Cleaner fish are a form of biological control based on ecological interaction that can be used instead of chemical control of sea lice, but little is known about their efficacy and value in commercial use. We estimate efficacy of cleaner fish using facility-level data. To identify exogenous variation in cleaner fish usage, we instrument site-level cleaner fish stocks using distance to cleaner fish farm with a commercial license. Cleaner fish use significantly reduces likelihood of sea lice levels exceeding regulatory threshold levels. Combining efficacy estimates with cost data and a structural model, we provide estimates of cost-effectiveness. Our results show that cleaner fish are privately cost-effective, which is consistent with high levels of adoption. However, cost-effectiveness also suggests that policy could encourage even more adoption of biological controls to reduce externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]