Production from Natural Resources with Latent Abundance Information

Résumé du livre

Ecosystem-based management of natural resources is widely reported by ecologists and has attracted attention from economists. For this management tool to be practical, it requires knowledge about dynamic human-natural interactions. However, the resource abundance, which is the most important state variable in natural resource production, is not directly observable to researchers in most cases. This dissertation is dedicated to addressing this challenge in empirical studies. The underlying rationale is that: if a common pool resource is jointly exploited by heterogeneous agents, the abundance information can be inferred from the economic behavior given structural information. The empirical study is the reef-fish fishery in the Gulf of Mexico. The comprehensive data set provides individual and spatial-temporal variations to deal with the latent stock problem. In addition, a rich set of fisheries management policies enable me to evaluate policy impacts and effectiveness. The dissertation consists of three parts.