About

Joshua Abbott is Director and Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. His research examines the equitable and sustainable governance of natural resources in the presence of environmental change, often employing economic modeling and statistical approaches in partnership with expertise from colleagues in other disciplines within the natural and social sciences. Professor Abbott has conducted extensive research on policy innovations to foster sustainable fisheries (both recreational and commercial) and blue economies, and has worked extensively with scientists, fishers, and policymakers within NOAA Fisheries and the US Fishery Management Council system to improve management outcomes for ecosystems and the people on which they depend. He has also developed research on the valuation and management of water resources, particularly in arid urban contexts, such as in the US Southwest. Professor Abbott has engaged with colleagues in economics and the natural sciences to develop rigorous metrics of the value of natural resources (e.g., groundwater, fish stocks) as forms of societal capital given ecological-economic couplings and uncertainty. These values can be utilized to inform decision making by governments and the private sector as well as contribute to national green accounting efforts. He teaches courses in natural resource and environmental economics, statistical methods, and sustainable seafood, and is the administrator of the Graduate Certificate in Environmental and Sustainability Economics. Additionally, he is a founding member of the Economics for Sustainability lab group.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Business
• Economics
• Psychology
• Public economics
• Fishery
• Geography
• Ecology
• Law and economics
• Environmental resource management
• Microeconomics
• Environmental planning
• Law
• Natural resource economics

Selected publications

• Risky (Natural) Assets: Stochasticity, Nonconvexity, and the Value of Natural Capital

  Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists · 2026-04-14

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Money Can't Buy Me Fish: Lessons from an Incentivized Harvest Program

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The global seafood trade, embodied nutrients, and nutritional affordability

  Nature Communications · 2025-07-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Globalization of seafood markets raises concerns about nutritional insecurity, as developing countries export nutrient-dense seafood to developed countries. However, imported seafood may offset nutritional losses from exports. Developing countries import seafood with low prices relative to developed countries, raising questions of whether low-price imports provide less nutrition and contribute to nutritional insecurity. We construct a dataset connecting country-level seafood trade flows to product-specific data on nutrient concentrations to investigate how the seafood trade affects nutritional affordability. We compare nutrient density per dollar in imported seafood. Across three macronutrients and six micronutrients and using six distinct classifications of development status, we consistently find that developing countries pay lower prices for nutrition in imported seafood than developed countries. We show that the nutritional bargain for developing countries partly reflects differences in the non-nutritional characteristics of seafood imports between developed and developing countries, including the extent of processing and product form. Despite exporting nutrient-rich seafood, developing countries import seafood with higher nutrient density per dollar than developed nations. These nutritional bargains are linked to differences in processing and product forms of traded seafood.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ex-Ante Diversification, Limited Entry Permit Portfolios, and Fishers’ Participation Decisions

  Marine Resource Economics · 2025-05-16

  articleOpen access

  This paper uses the limited entry (LE) permit portfolio in the previous year to construct an ex-ante measure of diversification at the individual level. We first show that LE permit portfolios in the previous year can effectively be seen as a choice set of the vessel this year. We then show that our diversification measure—the number of types of LE permits in the portfolio in the previous year—is strongly correlated with popular ex-post measures of diversification, but they tend to deviate when an external shock hits the fisheries. Focusing on the US West Coast during 1995–2016, we find that ex-ante more diversified vessels are more likely to participate in the following year, and they exhibit a smaller coefficient of variation in gross revenue. Overall, our measure of diversification is conceptually sound and can be used as an alternative to popular ex-post measures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contract and sustain: evaluating the results of progressive implementation of limited entry and catch shares in West Coast and Alaska Fisheries over four decades

  Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences · 2025-01-01

  articleSenior author

  Access to West Coast and Alaskan fisheries has been progressively tightened for more than four decades with limited license programs, buybacks, and catch share programs. We document the implementation of a series of limited access and catch share programs in federally and state managed fisheries of the West Coast and Alaska, and evaluate trends in participation, diversification, vessel revenue, and variation of revenue between 1981 and 2022 for this large interconnected system of fisheries. Over time, progressive tightening through further input controls, buybacks, and catch shares led to substantial consolidation and greater specialization coinciding with increased temporal diversification, maintained or increased revenue per vessel, and reduced variation in inter-annual revenue. However, low levels of fishery diversification for many fishers, and high dependency on a few key fisheries, may have left fishers vulnerable to ecological and economic shocks that impacted key fisheries leading to increased income variation and further declines in participation in recent years.

  PublisherDOI

• Resource Economics for Understanding Recreational Fishers and Fisheries

  Fish & fisheries series/Fish and fisheries series (Print) · 2025-12-14 · 8 citations

  book-chapterOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract We describe how resource economics measures the economic benefit of recreational fishing. Information about economic benefits provides one way to evaluate the social and economic consequences of a management or policy action. We divide this chapter into two parts. First, we describe random utility maximization theory, which explains fishing choices as a function of fishing site attributes, recreational fishers’ characteristics, and individual preferences. Models developed from random utility maximization theory and individual data have become the dominant approach in fisheries valuation. We emphasize that this value, though nearly always denominated in money units, is not equivalent to the actual amount of money spent on fishing. Second, we provide a pair of empirical demonstrations, one using actual fishing trip data and another using hypothetical data, based on a mail survey of license holders. We end this chapter with a discussion of using economic models to predict behaviours, frontier areas in recreation demand modelling, and integration with interdisciplinary research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Not by fishing alone: Non-fishing employment and income for US West Coast fishers

  Ocean & Coastal Management · 2023-07-25 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Seafood Trade and Nutritional Access

  Research Square · 2023-03-22 · 2 citations

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 100% renewable electricity policies in U.S. cities: A mixed methods analysis of adoption and implementation

  Energy Policy · 2022-05-23 · 19 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Not by Fishing Alone: Non-Fishing Employment and Income for Us West Coast Fishers

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CNH-L: The Dynamics of Adaptation to Climate-Driven Variability in California Current Fisheries And Fishing Communities

  NSF · $1.5M · 2016–2022

Frequent coauthors

• H. Allen Klaiber

  The Ohio State University

  29 shared

• V. Kerry Smith

  RTI International

  24 shared

• Eli P. Fenichel

  Yale University

  21 shared

• James E. Wilen

  16 shared

• Patrick Lloyd‐Smith

  15 shared

• Wiktor Adamowicz

  University of Alberta

  13 shared

• Daniel Willard

  Maranatha Christian University

  9 shared

• Brenna Jungers

  University of Alberta

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Agricultural and Resource Economics (environmental & resource economics & econometrics emphases)

  University of California, Davis

• M.A., Economics

  University of Washington, Seattle

• Other, Economics

  Baylor University