Reflections on Marine Resource Economics: Editor's Introduction

It is an honor to begin my tenure as editor of Marine Resource Economics. I am deeply indebted to my predecessors—Jon Sutinen, Cathy Roheim, and Jim Anderson—and to the many talented scholars who have contributed to the journal as authors, associate editors, and reviewers. this sizable research community has made Marine Resource Economics what it is today. I also feel fortunate that the talented and efficient Barbara Harrison has agreed to stay on as production manager and technical editor for the journal. I now take this opportunity to reflect on how the journal has succeeded in the past, what it currently is doing well, and how I hope to build on this rich tradition. MRE has always been an outlet for early results and imaginative new thinking on emerging topics in the marine environment. When I was in the early years of graduate school, important articles on the economics of marine reserves began to appear in the journal (Holland and Brazee 1996; Hannesson 1998). These works produced insights about what reserves may or may not do for fisheries and helped to lay the foundation for researchers like me to conduct subsequent conceptual and empirical work. Earlier in the journal archives, Anderson (1994) and Arnason (1994) sparked a lively debate that continues today about whether individual transferable quotas (ITQs) would create unintended ecological consequences. the idea of avoiding unintended consequences features prominently in an early example of modeling fishing behavior empirically that stresses the positive aspects of fisheries economics rather than the normative ones (Bockstael and Opaluch 1984). Building on this empirical approach, Eales and Wilen (1986) were the first to use discrete choice modeling to study fine-scale fisherman spatial behavior, an approach many fisheries economists have taken up and adapted since then. Similarly, Bockstael, McConnell, and Strand (1989) provided an early application of discrete choice methods to sportfishing. These techniques would become a workhorse of the recreation demand literature. the recreation demand literature, in turn, would produce numerous methodological innovations relevant to subsequent work in commercial fisheries. Some early contributions in MRE stimulated the growing interest in the economics of aquaculture and seafood markets. Bjorndal (1988) bioeconomically modeled the optimal harvest of farmed fish and demonstrated the similarity to the classic forestry problem in resource economics. Anderson (1985) modeled the bioeconomic relationship between wild and farmed seafood industries, and Bird (1986) provided an early salmon demand analysis that anticipated interest in the global seafood trade, market integration studies, and the empirical market relationships among farmed and wild fish. Although seafood has been the primary focus of MRE, some contributions from the journal archives highlight non-market values and coastal resources beyond fisheries. Several years before the Exxon Valdez incident sparked a massive interest in estimation of passive use values, Grigalunas et al. (1986) wrote about market and non-market damages from the 1978 Amoco Cadiz oil spill off the coast of Brittany. Whitehead (1993) conducted a stated preference study of endangered sea turtles and elaborated on the idea of total