Martin D. Smith

Bio and Research:

I study the economics of marine resources, including fisheries, marine ecosystems, and beaches. I am particularly interested in combining econometrics with bioeconomic modeling to analyze fisheries management. In a broader sense, my work strives to understand human impacts on our natural resource base and the dynamics of these coupled human-natural systems. My past work focuses on analyzing spatially explicit policies like marine reserves. To this end, I model the spatial decisions of individual fishing vessels and link empirical estimates to a dynamic and spatially explicit population model. I use the coupled model to simulate the impacts of forming marine reserves on the California sea urchin fishery. Recently, I adapted these techniques to study the economic impacts of marine reserves for fisheries management in Gulf of Mexico reef fish fisheries. Together with colleagues in the Nicholas School, I am adapting bioeconomic models to study beach management and coastline evolution as climate changes. We are calling this work 'morpho-economics' to highlight how economics and geomorphology combine to determine features of our coastline and associated property values. Other current projects include 1) analyzing the dynamic search strategies of individual commercial fishermen in the Alaskan crab fishery; 2) analyzing size-selective harvesting in fish populations and the potential for mixed policy instruments to address the problem; 3) using fine-scale economic data from the fishery to learn about bio-physical characteristics of marine ecosystems; and 4) estimating the value of reductions in estuarine pollution with a bioeconomic model of the North Carolina shrimp fishery. I am currently a co-editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.