85 Marine Resource Economics, Volume 18, pp. 85–112 0738-1360/00 $3.00 + .00 Printed in the U.S.A. All rights reserved Copyright © 2004 Marine Resources Foundation Marine Reserves with Endogenous Ports: Empirical Bioeconomics of the California Sea Urchin Fishery MARTIN D. SMITH Duke University JAMES E. WILEN University of California, Davis Abstract Marine reserves are gaining substantial public support as tools for commercial fisheries management. Harvest sector responses will influence policy performance, yet biological studies often depict harvester behavior as spread uniformly over fishing grounds and unresponsive to economic opportuni- ties. Previous bioeconomic analyses show that these behavioral assumptions are inconsistent with empirical data and, more importantly, lead to overly optimistic predictions about harvest gains from reserves. This paper adds another layer of behavioral realism to the bioeconomics of marine reserves by endogenizing fisher home port choices with a partial adjustment share model. Estimated with Seemingly Unrelated Regression over monthly data, this approach allows simu- lation of both short- and long-run behavioral response to changes induced by marine reserve formation. The findings cast further doubt on the notion that ma- rine reserves generate long-run harvest benefits. Key words Marine reserves, bioeconomics, seemingly unrelated regression, fishing port. JEL Classification Code Q22. Introduction In May of 2000, President Clinton signed an executive order that directed the De- partments of the Interior and Commerce to develop plans for an extensive network of marine protected areas in the coastal waters of the United States. The order was in direct response to claims by many influential marine scientists that our most im- Martin D. Smith is an assistant professor of Environmental Economics at the Nicholas School of the En- vironment and Earth Sciences, Box 90328, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708 USA, email: marsmith@duke.edu. James E. Wilen is a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616 USA, email: wilen@primal.ucdavis.edu. The authors thank Jim Sanchirico and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank M. Alicia Overstreet Galeano for research assistance. This research is funded, in part, by the Fishery Statistics and Economics Division of National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA Order #DG133F-02-SE-0626-NMFS; in part by a grant from the National Sea Grant College, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, under grant number NA06RG0142 project number R/F-179 through the California Sea Grant College System; and in part by the California State Resources Agency. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily re- flect the views of NOAA or any of its sub-agencies or the Resources Agency. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Research Papers in Economics