What do regulators do? Dynamic behavior of resource managers in the North Pacific Halibut Fishery 1935-1978

Most of the literature in resource economics is normative, focusing on questions such as: how should the use of resources be regulated? Little attention has been paid to exactly what regulators actually do in practice. This paper develops and estimates a model of regulatory behavior. We model the regulators' objective structure, as well as the mechanism regulators use to select policy instruments to achieve their objectives. We estimate the model using the North Pacific Halibut Fishery as a case study, allowing computation of the basic structural parameters as well as implicit weights in the regulators' objective function as revealed by their actual decisions.