Private Property and Economic Efficiency: A Study of a Common-Pool Resource

The British Columbia halibut fishery provides a natural experiment of the effects of "privatizing the commons". Using firm-level data from the fishery two years before private harvesting rights were introduced, the year they were implemented and three years afterwards, a stochastic frontier is estimated to test for changes in technical, allocative and economic efficiency. Despite some improvements in short-run measures of cost efficiency, overall the fishing fleet still remains well below the best practice frontier.