This paper examines the effect of the 2010 earthquake on the labour market in the Bío Bío region in Chile and suggests various public policies that could be considered for the future that would better equip the country for dealing with emergency situations in the areas of social and labour policy. The before the earthquake, the labour market of the Bío Bío region was underperforming compared to the rest of the country. The data gathered immediately after the earthquake show that its main form of adjustment to the crisis was the retreat of workers into inactivity.

We evaluate the factors that influence the reported level of pollution and those referred to the compliance with the payment of discharge fees from sources regulated under the Colombia’s Discharge Fee Program. The analysis uses a data set that contains information at plant level and considers individual sources operating under the jurisdiction of the Regional Autonomous Corporation of the Chivor (Corpochivor), for period 2001-2006.

In this article, we assess the effect that two different fishery management regimes have on the duration of the fishing trip. A basic theoretical model predicts that trip duration should increase with temporal closures and decrease with an individual quota system. Therefore, we propose and apply an empirical trip duration model.

Although failures and successes in fisheries management are related to decision making processes, these are rarely analyzed in detail and even less often following quantitative or semi-quantitative approaches. Herein, we study the decision making process for Chile's most important fisheries using a binary decision model. This model evaluates the probability that an annual total allowable catch (TAC) will or will not be modified by the National Fisheries Council (NFC) based on biological, economic, and social factors.

We estimate the technical efficiency gains of introducing individual quotas (IQs) in fisheries. Our estimates are based on two samples of vessels, considering a potential self-selection bias and controlling for quality changes in landings induced by the IQ system. The results suggest that the introduction of IQs has an important positive impact on fleet efficiency, and that properly measuring this impact requires controlling for the self-selection bias and quality changes induced by the regulatory shift.

We study the economic performance of Benthic Resource Management Areas (BRMAs) in central-southern Chile. The analysis considers 26 managed areas with Agreements of Use declaring Chilean abalone (Concholepas concholepas) to be the main exploited benthic resource from 2001 to 2003. Our analysis explores the role played by several characteristics thought to be potential BRMA performance determinants. These variables were defined and grouped into four types: economic, environmental–biological, institutional–organizational, and organizational leader.

In contrast with what we perceive is the conventional wisdom about setting a second-best emissions tax to control a uniformly mixed pollutant under uncertainty, we demonstrate that setting a uniform tax equal to expected marginal damage is not generally efficient under incomplete information about firms’ abatement costs and damages from pollution.

Implementation and management of an ITQ fishery involves significant and costly administrative activities.  These activities include formulating and implementing policy rules, monitoring and enforcement to deter illegal behavior, and economic and marine research.  In this project we construct a model of a competitive ITQ system to analyze how the distribution of administrative costs between the public and a fishing industry can affect the equilibrium in the quota market, including equilibrium level of administrative costs, and derive results about the optimal distribution of these