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

Matthew N. Reimer, Joshua Abbott, James E. Wilen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

32 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 institutionalchanges.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)143-168
Number of pages26
JournalMarine Resource Economics
Volume32
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2017

Keywords

  • Policy evaluation
  • fisheries
  • location choice
  • policy invariance
  • production function
  • simulation

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Oceanography
  • Geography, Planning and Development
  • Economics and Econometrics
  • Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

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