Economic Models of Recreational and Commercial Fishing and Their Impact on the Great Lakes Ecosystem

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three papers, each presenting an economic model of human behavior as it applies to three environmental issues in the Great Lakes basin. The first paper estimates response to government-issued information on the risks of eating PCB-contaminated sportfish. We use 19 years of creel survey data to estimate the effect of more lenient fish consumption advisories (FCAs) on the size of Chinook salmon kept and the effect of more stringent FCAs on the number of yellow perch kept. We find that in both cases the FCAs appear to have had the intended effects. The second paper models commercial fish harvest on the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. A potential control strategy for Asian carp, an invasive species, is to pay commercial fishermen a subsidy to harvest Asian carp. We estimate a model of the supply of fish and use it to determine whether a higher price for Asian carp will generate greater harvest and whether increased harvest of Asian carp will also increase the harvest of native fish that are produced using the same fishing gear. We find that fish harvest is insensitive to marginal changes in fish prices. We also find that fishers are able to target Asian carp effectively enough that harvest of native species will probably not increase. The third paper examines location and gear choices of commercial fishers in Lake Michigan. Previous models predict that fishers move in response to changes in expected returns between alternative fishing locations. Our results, however, show that in this fishery, fishers are relatively immobile and do not change fishing locations (or fishing gear) even when fishing grounds are subject to a seasonal closure. We estimate a model of fisher participation to quantify the effects of the seasonal closure.