Impact of Collective Rights-based Fisheries Management: Evidence from the New England Groundfish Fishery

Abstract

This article uses a trip-level dataset to analyze the impact of a collective rights-based management system (“sectors”) introduced in the New England groundfish fishery in 2010. We examine the change of a number of outcome variables, including effort, species diversity, and location diversity. We then examine whether participation in sectors led to shifts in the production frontier and/or changes in technical efficiency using stochastic frontier models. Our results suggest that participation in sectors appears to have impacted trawl vessels more than gillnet vessels, likely due to the different ways in which the effort regulations in place under the common-pool regime impacted these vessel types. In addition, sector participation appears to have an impact on behavioral responses (i.e., changes in effort and diversity of species and locations) rather than technical efficiency, despite some evidence that sector participation led to shifts in the production frontiers of both vessel types.