Abstract
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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 169-190 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Marine Resource Economics |
Volume | 32 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 1 2017 |
Keywords
- bycatch
- fisheries
- hyperbolic distance function
- Policy evaluation
- policy invariance
- production function
- targeting ability
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Oceanography
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Economics and Econometrics
- Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law