Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the 'Rights to Fish' : The Effects of Catch Shares on Fishermen's Days at Sea

This paper investigates whether rights-based management in fisheries ends the “race to fish.” The staggered introductions of catch shares in the Alaska pollock and Pacific hake fisheries — neighboring regional fisheries that are the largest and sixth largest fishery by volume in the United States, respectively — provide a unique natural experiment for isolating the impact of “catch shares.” Difference-in-difference-indifferences estimations, combined with vessel fixed effects, indicate that catch shares are associated with an increase in the number of days that a harvester spends at sea engaging in fishing activities, which implies a slowing of fishing effort, ceteris paribus. For the Pacific hake fishery, participation in the pollock fishery is a negative predictor of a harvester's days at sea in the target fishery. In the initial two years when the hake fishery was rationalized before the pollock fishery the pollock fishery served as a derby alternative for hake harvesters. Results also show that pollock and hake harvesters respond to changing economic conditions: fish or fish product prices are positive predictors of days at sea. For the Pacific hake catcher-processor fleet, an estimated increase in days at sea per ton of catch suggests that a harvester's fishing intensity has also slowed as a result of catch shares