On the Economic Optimality of Marine Reserves When Fishing Damages Habitat

In this thesis, I expand a spatially-explicit bioeconomic fishery model to include the negative effects of fishing effort on habitat quality. I consider two forms of effort-driven habitat damage: First, fishing effort may directly increase individual mortality rates. Second, fishing effort may increase competition between individuals, thereby increasing density-dependent mortality rates. I then optimize effort distribution and fish stock density according to three management cases: (1) a sole owner, with jurisdiction over the entire fishery, who seeks to maximize profit by optimizing effort distribution; (2) a manager with limited control of effort and stock distributions, who seeks to maximize tax revenue by setting the length of a single, central reserve and a uniform tax per unit effort outside it; and (3) a manager with even more limited enforcement power, who can only set a ta