Matthew N. Reimer

Hidden Flexibility: Institutions, Incentives, and the Margins of Selectivity in Fishing

The degree to which selectivity in fisheries is malleable to changes in incentive structures is critical for policy design. We examine data for a multispecies trawl fishery before and after a transition from management under common-pool quotas to a fishery cooperative and note a substantial shift in postcooperative catch from bycatch and toward valuable target species. We examine the margins used to affect catch composition, finding that large- and fine-scale spatial decision making and avoidance of night-fishing were critical. We argue that the poor incentives for selectivity in many systems may obscure significant flexibility in multispecies production technologies. (JEL Q22, Q28)

Unraveling the Multiple Margins of Rent Generation from Individual Transferable Quotas

Individual transferable quotas (ITQs) induce changes along both the extensive margin—via consolidation of quota among fewer vessels—and the intensive margin, as harvesters adjust their behavior to ITQ incentives. We use ITQ introduction in the Bering Sea crab fishery to decompose the sources of rent generation across both margins. We embed an empirically calibrated structural model of the harvesting process into a sector-level model, allowing us to experimentally “unravel” the ITQ treatment. We show that the magnitude and source of rent generation under ITQs critically depends on the manner and degree of rent dissipation before ITQs are implemented. (JEL Q22, Q28)

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

ABSTRACT The fishery-dependent data used to estimate fishing production technologies are shaped by the incentive structures that influence fishermens 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 institutional changes. JEL Codes: D24, Q22.

Empirical Models of Fisheries Production: Conflating Technology with Incentives?

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. JEL Codes: D24, Q22.