The impact of catch shares on multiregional fishery participation and effort: The case of west coast harvesters in the Alaska fisheries

Rationalization in fisheries has been shown to lead to the slowing of fishing activity, input and effort consolidation, cost savings, and new market and product development. The effects of rationalization on fishermen's behavior become more complex when one accounts for the spillover effects that catch share programs can create in other fisheries and regions. Recently available annual costs and earnings data allow us to quantify the average marginal effects of the U.S. West Coast Groundfish Trawl Catch Share Program on fisheries in Alaska. Empirical results indicate that the primary drivers of harvest in the Alaska fisheries are vessel size and operating costs for catcher vessels that deliver to West Coast mothership processors and shoreside processing plants. Rationalization does not appear to have a statistically significant impact on whether and to what extent catcher vessels that are endorsed to fish in both regions actually fish in Alaska. The advent of catch shares on the West Coast has in effect harmonized fishery management across the two regions. Conditional on fishing in Alaska, the advent of catch shares in the West Coast groundfish trawl fishery has lengthened the number of days at sea in Alaska for the West Coast catcher vessels that participate in the Alaska fisheries. This result is in line with the fact that after rationalization, catcher vessels have increasingly harvested in one region rather than fishing in both regions.