Structural Behavioral Models for Rights-Based Fisheries

Abstract

Rights-based management is prevalent in today's developed-world fisheries, yet spatiotemporal models of fishing behavior do not reflect such institutional settings. We develop a model of spatiotemporal fishing behavior that incorporates the dynamic and general equilibrium elements of catch-share fisheries. We propose an estimation strategy that is able to recover structural behavioral parameters through a nested fixed-point maximum likelihood procedure. We illustrate our modeling approach through a Monte Carlo analysis and demonstrate its importance for predicting out-of-sample counterfactual policies.