Lab Seminar: Andres de Loera
This week, the Lab hosted Andres de Loera, a PhD candidate in economics at Harvard University. Andres studies environmental and public economics with a focus on the governance of internationally shared ocean resources. He presented his job market paper, entitled "Climate Change and the Common Pool Problem in Fisheries".
Andres' work asks: How significant is the common-pool problem in global fisheries, and how will it be affected by climate change? Many fish populations span country borders, diluting the incentive for governments to conserve. Climate change will upend the current equilibrium by directly affecting fisheries productivity and by altering the distribution of fish populations as they migrate towards more favorable environments.
The later effect could lead to maladaptive overexploitation by stock-losers as it weakens incentives for conservation, but could also increase conservation by stock-gainers. Andres constructs a panel of fishery ranges and shows this strategic response in historical data: stock-level extraction rates rise as the share of a stock controlled by that country falls. He then simulates the effects of future climate change on fish ranges and extraction. The strategic response to range shift is close to zero on net, but economically meaningful for individual fisheries: stock-gainers increase escapement (the quantity of available fish not caught) by 2.6% and stock-losers decrease escapement by 3%. For the average fishery, this strategic response comprises 25% of the total effect of climate change on the fish stock. Andres also simulates fisheries outcomes under first-best global cooperation, and finds a 77% increase in escapement. In a more plausible scenario of US-Canada cooperation, escapement increases by 14% and the effects of climate change are dampened.