Publication: Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery
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2022-12
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2023-01-19
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This paper establishes that a targeted policy backfires because it reveals information about non-targeted 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, the analysis isolates variation in closures that is due to the regulator’s lower resolution data. Closures cause substantial temporal and spatial spillovers. Closures increase total juvenile catch by 48 percent because closure announcements implicitly signal that there is high productivity fishing before, just outside, and after closures.
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“Englander, Aaron Gabriel Ratliffe. 2022. Information and Spillovers from Targeting Policy in Peru's Anchoveta Fishery. Policy Research Working Papers;10248. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/38511 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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