While environmental stressors such as hypoxia (low dissolved oxygen) are perceived as a threat to the productivity of coastal ecosystems, policy makers have little information about the economic consequences for fisheries. Recent work on hypoxia develops a bioeconomic model to harness microdata...

The emergence of ecosystem-based management suggests that traditional fisheries management and protection of environmental quality are increasingly interrelated. But fishery managers have limited control over most sources of marine and estuarine pollution and at best can only adapt to...

This paper comments on a recent paper published in the journal Nature that claims that fisheries co-management causes successful outcomes in fisheries. We outline theoretical arguments in favor of and against co-management as an approach to solving fisheries-commons problems. We argue that the...

Fisheries resources contribute a valuable source of protein to the world's food supply. While there is much promise for continued production gains from aquaculture and terrestrial sources, the marine fisheries sector faces a number of critical current policy junctures. Since extension of...

Commons problems present behavioral dilemmas, with tensions between individual and collective rationality. When users of a common-pool resource are not effectively excluded, the collective behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interests dissipates resource rents. We derive a non-parametric...

This paper examines the joint agro-wildfowl regulation of the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in California. The area is jointly managed by the Bureau of Reclamation for both farming and wildfowl benefits. Production in both sectors has been declining recently, in farming due to nematode and...

Marine ecologists warn that humans are "fishing down marine food webs." To explore the economic implications of this phenomenon, this paper applies portfolio theory to aggregate fisheries data. It poses two definitions of a sustainable mean-variance catch frontier. It computes a mean-variance...

This paper models dynamic producer and consumer benefits from improving habitat that supports the North Carolina blue crab fishery. It embeds two fishery management institutions—open access and partial rationalization—in a multispecies, two-patch spatial bioeconomic model with endogenous...