Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery

Gabriel Englander

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2023, vol. 15, issue 4, 390-427

Abstract: This paper establishes that a targeted policy backfires because it reveals information about nontargeted units. In the world's largest fishery, the regulator attempts to reduce the harvesting of juvenile fish by temporarily closing areas where the share of juvenile catch is high. By combining administrative microdata with biologically richer data from fishing firms, I isolate variation in closures that is due to the regulator's lower-resolution data. I estimate substantial temporal and spatial spillovers from closures. Closures increase total juvenile catch by 48 percent because closure announcements implicitly signal that fishing before, just outside, and after closures is high productivity.

JEL-codes: D83 O13 Q21 Q22 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1257/pol.20210812

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