Production in a Schooling Fishery: The Case of the North Sea Herring Fishery

The purpose of this paper is to undertake an empirical analysis of the harvest (production) function for the North Sea herring fishery. The approach of the paper is to specify a general production function, where output (harvest) is a function of variable inputs and fixed factors. In particular, output elasticities and returns to scale will be analyzed. Moreover, the effect of fisheries regulations on harvesting will be investigated. The empirical work is based on cross sectional data for 1968, 1971, and 1975. For empirical estimation, different functional forms as well as statistical procedures are employed. The empirical results indicate that there is a rising marginal product to the variable input in the fishery. This somewhat surprising result, which is not commonly seen in the literature and indicates that the boats operate in stage one, is attributed to interactions between pre-, postand main season fisheries. Fishery regulations that were in force, including total quotas and closed seasons, are found to be either ineffective or causing boats to operate inefficiently. In section I the fishery and the data are described, while the model is specified in section II. Empirical results from estimating the production function are presented in section III, while the work is briefly summarized in section IV.