Lab Seminar: Kelly Wu

This week, ARE PhD candidate Kelly Wu presented her ongoing work, entitled "Spatial, temporal, and cross-fishery adaptation in the U.S. West Coast Dungeness Crab Fishery."

 

This work is motivated by the fact that climate shocks increasingly disrupt coastal fisheries. Kelly and coauthors examine how fishermen respond to climate shocks in the U.S. West Coast Dungeness crab fishery, where Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) increasingly trigger fishery closures. Using a weekly panel for 42 ports in California, Oregon, and Washington from 2006 to 2021, they estimate a nonlinear damage function that quantifies the economic costs of climate-induced disruptions, accounting for three margins of adaptation: spatial reallocation, intertemporal effort shifting, and cross-fishery substitution. 

 

They then use this framework to simulate season revenue under alternative closure lengths, finding that temporal adaptation plays the dominant role in mitigating revenue losses. In particular, they observe a clear rebound effect after reopening, with crab revenues higher immediately following closures than in comparable periods in seasons without HAB disruptions. In San Francisco, for example, temporal adaptation adds the equivalent of 16\% of open-season revenue in a season that begins with a seven-week closure. This paper's results inform climate-risk management by clarifying when the costs of closures may outweigh the trade-offs of conditional earlier openings.