When individual vessel quotas are used in fisheries management, quotas are set species by species, in most cases. Often, it is only the most important of the target species that are regulated by quota. There is a growing concern that the introduction of individual vessel quotas leads to...

Traditional fisheries management schemes generate incentives for vessels to maximize catch, resulting in rent dissipation and overcapacity. Individual vessel quota management schemes change the incentives to maximize profit and have the potential to generate resource rent and reduce capacity. An...

In industries where firms can adjust product mix in response to price changes, the process can be delayed by adjustment costs. An example is fishermen who change fishing grounds to target different species. If adjustment costs are sufficiently large, this may hamper the fishermen’s response so...

Starting in the 1960s, considerable opposition to the Canadian and Norwegian harp seal hunt off Newfoundland developed. It was alleged that the seal hunt was unethical and that the seal population had been seriously depleted. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the production function for...

The relative performance between seasons in a fishery is tested empirically. In particular, the importance of a stochastic environment-what may be denoted as fishing luck in a fishery-is established by applying Dickey-Fuller unit-root tests for the efficiency scores of vessels between seasons....

We analyze the effect of technological change on labor and total factor productivity in the Lofoten fishery, using detailed data for 130 years. Our findings support the important role of natural resources in productivity and improvements in welfare in natural resource–based industries. The...