Three Essays on Environmental and Resource Economics

Almost six decades have passed since Garrett Hardin’s seminal paper, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968), yet the fundamental dilemma he described remains as pressing as ever. Hardin depicted a world in which shared resources—ranging from pastures and fisheries to forests and even the atmosphere—are inevitably depleted when individuals act in their own rational self-interest. At the core of this issue lies the inherent tension between private incentives and collective well-being, a challenge that continues to characterized contemporary environmental issues. Overfishing, deforestation, air pollution, and climate change all exemplify the persistent difficulty of managing common resources in a manner that reconciles short-term individual benefits with long-term societal sustainability. Despite its enduring relevance, Hardin’s thesis was incomplete. He posited that common resources would inevitably be mismanaged unless governed through either stringent state control or privatization. However, subsequent decades of research in environmental and resource economics have provided a more nuanced perspective. Elinor Ostrom’s work (1990) demonstrated that under certain conditions, communities can successfully self-organize to manage common-pool resources through locally developed institutions that balance access and sustainability. These insights suggest that effective resource governance is not merely a question of ownership or regulatory imposition, but rather one of designing appropriate incentives, governance structures, and information systems to guide human behavior. This evolution in economic thought and more recent research have reshaped the approach to natural resource management. A key lesson from modern environmental and resource economics is that there is no universal solution to the governance of common resources. In some contexts, well-defined property rights—such as individual transferable quotas (ITQs) in fisheries or cap-and-trade systems for pollution—can establish market-based incentives that enhance efficiency. In others, community-led governance has proven more effective than either government regulation or market mechanisms. Thus, the challenge for policymakers is not simply a choice between ”more regulation” or ”more markets,” but rather the design of institutions that align individual decision-making with broader societal objectives. Within this framework, data-driven research plays a crucial role in informing managers’ decisions. Effective policymaking requires an in-depth understanding of how natural resources are used, how economic incentives shape human behavior, and how governance structures influence outcomes. Without this foundation, interventions risk being ineffective, economically inefficient, or even counterproductive. This dissertation engages with these challenges by addressing three key dimensions of the information problem in natural resource management. Each of the three chapters explores a different aspect of how environmental and resource economics can enhance our understanding of the complex interplay between human activity and natural resources. Despite their distinct focal points, the three chapters share two unifying themes. First, they all center on fisheries, which serve as an ideal case study for examining common-pool resource management. Fisheries exemplify the challenges of managing a renewable yet finite resource, characterized by intricate ecological-economic interactions, data limitations, and behavioral responses that influence policy effectiveness. Moreover, fisheries are subject to both immediate human pressures—such as overfishing, habitat degradation, and regulatory compliance—and long-term environmental changes, including climate-driven shifts in species distribution and oceanic conditions. These characteristics make fisheries a valuable context in which to investigate broader themes of measurement, valuation, and causality in resource management. Second, each chapter employs a rigorous quantitative approach, contributing to the broader effort of leveraging data-driven economic analysis to improve resource management. By applying advanced econometric techniques, causal inference methods, and predictive modeling, this dissertation generates sound empirical insights into human-environment interactions, ensuring that policy decisions are grounded in scientific rigor rather than assumption or intuition. The first chapter examines the challenge of measuring human impact on the environment, particularly when direct observation is costly or infeasible. This issue is investigated in the context of marine recreational fisheries (MRF), an activity that engages millions globally but remains largely unaccounted for in fisheries policies due to data limitations. Traditional survey-based methods, while valuable, often fail to capture the full scale of participation and effort. This chapter develops a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) hurdle specification to more accurately estimate MRF activity using data from a large-scale telephone survey in Italy, encompassing over 16,000 respondents. The findings indicate that existing methods significantly underestimate participation rates and fishing effort, raising concerns that recreational fishing exerts a far greater pressure on fish stocks than previously assumed. This study demonstrates that model-based approaches can enhance the cost-effectiveness of data collection, enabling more informed, evidence-based decision-making in resource management. The second chapter shifts the focus from measurement to the valuation of natural resources, contributing to the research over a persistent challenge in environmental economics: how to accurately estimate values generated by natural resources. This chapter investigates how status quo bias, i.e. the behavioral tendency to choose what is already known or experienced, distorts willingness-to-pay estimates for environmental improvements, using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) in a natural resource management setting. More in detail, this Chapter investigates how the framing of the status quo alternative, or the ”dispersion” of the hypothetical alternatives around the status quo can affect willingness to pay estimates. Defining the dispersion as a measure of how different are the hypothetical alternatives with respect to the status quo we find that such variable can introduce a systematic bias in welfare estimates if not properly accounted for. The context of application is Bluefin Tuna recreational fishery, but the chapter relevance and contribution is mainly methodological. The third and final chapter examines the causal relationship between environmental change and the economic value generated by commercial fisheries, a critical issue in the context of climate change. Rising sea surface temperatures are transforming marine ecosystems, yet the extent to which these changes impact fisheries remains inadequately understood—posing a significant challenge for the development of adaptive management strategies. In this study, we construct a unique dataset comprising more than 4.5 million observations, integrating geo-referenced fisheries revenue data from the European Union with satellite-derived sea surface temperature records and fish species characteristics. Utilizing species-specific thermal preferences, we develop a novel measure of heat exposure, termed degree days, to quantify deviations from optimal temperature conditions. Our findings reveal that deviations from species’ preferred temperature ranges—both warmer and colder—have a significant, causal, and negative impact on fisheries revenues, with warmer temperatures exerting the most pronounced effect. Model projections indicate an overall negative economic impact of climate change by 2100, characterized by substantial geographic heterogeneity. These findings are of fundamental importance for the management of fisheries in response to climate change, as they provide empirical evidence to inform adaptive policies that mitigate economic losses and promote long-term sustainability. Overall, this dissertation aim to reinforce a key message: environmental protection can be reconciled with economic development. Better data, better models, and better governance structures can improve how we measure, value, and understand natural resource use, we can move toward more adaptive, evidence-based policies that balance economic prosperity with ecological sustainability in a rapidly changing world.