Economics and Marine Resource Management
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (CST)
- Chair: Eyal Frank, University of Chicago
Tuna fishing closure causes fleet redistribution on the high seas: A novel example of the pollution haven hypothesis
Abstract
The stringency of environmental regulation of tuna production in the Pacific Ocean varies temporally, spatially, and cross-sectionally for firms registered in the United States. We use this variation, which is exogenous to changes in trade policy for fish, to test the central tenet of the pollution haven hypothesis—does stricter environmental regulation cause firms to relocate to less regulated regions? Using difference-in-differences models, we find that firms move to less regulated regions within a few weeks of tightened environmental regulation, resulting in a roughly 600 mile shift away from normal fishing grounds. We do not observe reductions in aggregate environmental damage and, in some years, more stringent regulations cause more environmental harm than would be observed in the absence of these regulations.Regulating Biological Resources: Lessons from Marine Fisheries in the United States
Abstract
In 1996, with U.S. fish stocks in decline, Congress overhauled fishing laws with astrict, science-based management regime. In the years since, the Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) has come to be regarded internationally
as a gold standard in sustainable fishery management. Yet as the law awaits
a long-overdue and likely controversial reauthorization, its impact on U.S. fish populations
and fisheries remains poorly understood. A major challenge to measuring the
efficacy of biological resource management policies is that data are noisy and policy
treatments are not randomly assigned. As a result, causally interpretable empirical
studies of such policies’ impacts are rare, and in the case of MSA there has been none
until now. Compiling the largest dataset to date on U.S. and Canadian fishery status
and management, we carefully construct sets of stocks to approximate the counterfactual
biomass that they would have experienced without the treatment. We find that
treated stocks more than tripled in biomass relative to these counterfactuals following
the establishment of rebuilding provisions in the MSA’s 1996 reauthorization. Even
as we explore alternative confounders to these effects, such as changes in demand,
environmental conditions, and technology, our interpretation of the results holds.
The effect of fuel subsidies on Chinese distant water fishing
Abstract
Causal evidence on the effect of fuel subsidies on fishing activities is unavailable, despite the widespread belief among researchers and policymakers that fuel subsidies are one of the biggest causes of fisheries depletion. China’s fishing fleet is the world’s largest, and in 2016 the government changed its fuel subsidy policy for distant water vessels to one that increases with predetermined vessel characteristics. The policy features 25 thresholds at which subsidies discontinuously increase. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that a 1% increase in fuel subsidy increases hours of fishing by 1.4%. We use these estimates to calculate how global fish populations would change if China reduced fuel subsidies.Discussant(s)
Gabriel Englander
,
World Bank
Anouch Missirian
,
Toulouse School of Economics
Jennifer Raynor
,
Wesleyan University
Eyal Frank
,
University of Chicago
JEL Classifications
- Q2 - Renewable Resources and Conservation
- Q5 - Environmental Economics