Bioeconometrics: Empirical Modeling of Bioeconomic Systems

The rise of ecosystem management as an approach to renewable resource policy increases the demand for empirical bioeconomics. This paper provides a working definition of bioeconometrics and a taxonomy of model types. A bioeconometric model is a structural model that econometrically estimates one or more parameters of a bioeconomic system. Bioeconometric model types include equilibrium, dynamically decoupled, and dynamically coupled. The challenges and importance of bioeconometrics are illustrated with a Monte Carlo analysis of simulated data that attempts to differentiate among six different qualitative categories in a system characterized by critical depensation. The analysis highlights a theme in nonlinear dynamics - that a small quantitative change in a parameter can affect the qualitative dynamics - and shows that the econometrician may know the least empirically about a bioeconomic system when she needs to know the most.

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