Fishing Portfolio Response to a Climate Shock

Fishing portfolio diversification has been identified as a mechanism to mitigate risk exposure for harvesters operating in wild-capture fisheries. As in financial markets, however, the benefits from diversification in fisheries will be a function of whether individuals adopt active or passive investment strategies. There is a long history of evidence of the superior performance of passive investment strategies in the financial economics literature, but little is known about the relative performance of these two strategies in fisheries. Here we use a case study of an observed and high-profile climate shock in the California Dungeness crab fishery to estimate the impact of a relatively active investment strategy, in the form of an extreme decision to exit the fishery for the season, in response to the shock. We find robust evidence of negative revenue impacts from an active investment strategy in this context.