Ecological and Environmental Economics
Members:
José M. Maroto y Manuel Morán
Description:
Our primary research interests are in developing stochastic dynamic optimization bioeconomic models which allow us to analyze the potential danger of collapse of ecological and commercially valuable fish stocks. In particular, our research has focused on the biological and economic consequences of the presence of increasing returns (non-concavities) in the net revenue function from the fishery. More recently, our research has focused on detection of depensatory population dynamics which might be linked to the lack of recovery of collapsed species despite the moratorium which still remain in force. This result concurs with the observed non-recovery of collapsed species and seems to confirm that classic bioeconomic models are unable to describe the population dynamics of collapsed fish stocks since they overestimate the growth rate of these species at low population sizes.
The existence and stability of Equilibrium vs. collapse in age-structured models, has also recently been the subject of our research.
At present, our primary research interest is in constructing a bridge between continuous and discrete-time bioconomic models which overcomes the economic and biological weakness and preserves the strengths of both approaches, and which allows us to analyze the complex phenomenon of seasonality in real world fisheries.
