This dissertation examines three themes of efficiency in fisheries economics and management. The first theme is intertemporal efficiency; by examining fishery management problems within a stochastic bioeconomic model, the tradeoffs between current and future consumption are clear. The second theme explored in this essay is the efficiency of tradable permits system in the presence of trade restrictions. The third theme explored in this dissertation is efficiency in the presence of ecosystem externalities. Fisheries managers must often make decisions even while there is large amounts of uncertainty regarding stock level; furthermore, there are often fairly long periods of time in which they are unable to assess stock levels. The first essay examines a bioeconomic fishery model that includes rigidity in the policy-setting process, a management reality that has yet to be incorporated into these types of models. Although analytically intractable, the model is simulated across a range of biological and institutional parameters to learn how this rigidity affects the manager’s optimization problem. While the effects of rigidity with deterministic stock growth are shown to be small; when growth is stochastic, the present value of fisheries revenue may drastically decline under rigid management. By solving for the present value of fisheries revenues across a wide range of parameter values, the economic tradeoffs between management and scientific activities can be clarified. The second essay examines bilateral bargaining in a market for a unique synthetic input permits, Days-at-Sea, in the Northeast groundfish fishery. This research applies a quantile regression approach to the estimation of bargaining power and tests a key identification assumption of bargaining power equality made by previous researchers. One of the findings of this research is that current regulations may have segmented this market, endowing some firms with bargaining power relative to others. The final essay examines a small ecosystem-economy in which there are competing extractive and non-extractive uses for the fishery resource. In this ecosystem, herring are commerically harvested and are food for whales, which are an input in a non-extractive tourism industry, whale-watching. A finding of this research is that fishing negatively impacts the whale-watching industry; however, the magnitude of these effects are small. The results contained in this essay are useful inputs for managers seeking to implement Ecosystem Based Fishery Management.
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign