Discrete Choice Modeling of Fishers’ Landing Locations

Commercial fishing decisions about where to land and sell catches have important efficiency and distributional implications for fishing communities. Unlike fishing location choices, landing locations choices have received little attention. We develop a model of fishers’ landing sites in northern Norway. While fishers are highly responsive to travel distance, we find that expected revenues are a lesser driver of landing location choices. Rather, choices are dominated by strong state dependence, and most vessels always land at the same port. These results suggest that economic policies designed to redistribute landings in order to aid certain communities would not necessarily draw fishers away from their preferred landing sites. On the other hand, the responsiveness of some fishers to intraseasonal stock movements offers a glimpse of how climate change could reshape the spatial equilibria of landings and seafood production in years to come.