About

James Wilen is a faculty member in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis. The page does not provide specific details about his research focus, background, or key contributions.

Research topics

• Economics
• Political Science
• Public economics
• Business
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Microeconomics
• Social Science
• Market economy
• Environmental ethics
• Geography
• Economic geography
• Geology
• Fishery
• Social psychology
• Positive economics
• Economic growth
• Public relations
• Demography
• Environmental planning
• Environmental resource management
• Oceanography
• Neuroscience
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Regulated open access and regulated restricted access fisheries

  Elsevier eBooks · 2024-10-17

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Fisheries subsidies reform in China

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023 · 22 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Business

  Subsidies are widely criticized in fisheries management for promoting global fishing capacity growth and overharvesting. Scientists worldwide have thus called for a ban on "harmful" subsidies that artificially increase fishing profits, resulting in the recent agreement among members of the World Trade Organization to eliminate such subsidies. The argument for banning harmful subsidies relies on the assumption that fishing will be unprofitable after eliminating subsidies, incentivizing some fishermen to exit and others to refrain from entering. These arguments follow from open-access governance regimes where entry has driven profits to zero. Yet many modern-day fisheries are conducted under limited-access regimes that limit capacity and maintain economic profits, even without subsidies. In these settings, subsidy removal will reduce profits but perhaps without any discernable effect on capacity. Importantly, until now, there have been no empirical studies of subsidy reductions to inform us about their likely quantitative impacts. In this paper, we evaluate a policy reform that reduced fisheries subsidies in China. We find that China's subsidy reductions accelerated the rate at which fishermen retired their vessels, resulting in reduced fleet capacity, particularly among older and smaller vessels. Notably, the reduction of harmful subsidies was only partly responsible for reducing fleet capacity; an increase in vessel retirement subsidies was also a necessary driver of capacity reduction. Our study demonstrates that the efficacy of removing harmful subsidies depends on the policy environment in which removals occur.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Earth stewardship: Shaping a sustainable future through interacting policy and norm shifts

  AMBIO · 2022 · 73 citations

  • Political Science
  • Economic system
  • Business

  Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Governance in the Face of Extreme Events: Lessons from Evolutionary Processes for Structuring Interventions, and the Need to Go Beyond

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021-01-01 · 11 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Governance in the Face of Extreme Events: Lessons from Evolutionary Processes for Structuring Interventions, and the Need to Go Beyond

  Ecosystems · 2021-09-07 · 48 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Urbanization, Migration, and Adaptation to Climate Change

  One Earth · 2020 · 96 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Economic geography
  • Environmental resource management
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bioeconomics of Spatial Exploitation in a Patchy Environnriment*

  2020-01-16 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Received October 9, 1997; revised October 1998 This paper presents a model of renewable resource exploitation that incorporates both intertemporal dynamics and spatial movement. The model combines the H. S. Gordon–Vernon Smith hypothesis of a rent dissipation process with Ricardian notions that resources are exploited across space in a pattern dependent upon relative profitabilities. The population structure is characterized in a manner consistent with modern biological ideas that stress patchiness, heterogeneity, and interconnections among and between patches. Generally, we find the equilibrium patterns of biomass and effort across the system to be dependent upon bioeconomic conditions within each patch and the nature of the biological dispersal mechanism between patches. We use simple examples to illustrate how the distribution of effort throughout the system reflects the heterogeneity and the spatial biological linkages. © 1999 Academic Press

  PublisherDOI

• An invitation for more research on transnational corporations and the biosphere

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2020-02-28 · 14 citations

  letterOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social dimensions of fertility behavior and consumption patterns in the Anthropocene

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 54 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Economics

  162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Model of Regulated Open Access Resource Use*

  2020-01-16 · 6 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Received October 5, 1994; revised August 24, 1995 This paper develops a model of regulated open access resource exploitation. The regulatory model assumes that regulators are goal oriented, choosing target harvest levels according to a safe stock concept. These harvest quotas are implemented by setting season lengths, conditioned on the industry fishing capacity. The industry enters until rents are dissipated, conditioned on season length regulations. Harvest levels, fishing capacity, season length, and biomass are determined jointly. Using parameter estimates from the long-regulated North Pacific Halibut fishery, predictions of these variables from the regulated open access model are compared to predictions that arise from the Gordon model. © 1997 Academic Press

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• James N. Sanchirico

  University of California, Davis

  31 shared

• Carl Folke

  Stockholm University

  20 shared

• Martin D. Smith

  Duke University

  18 shared

• Joshua K. Abbott

  Arizona State University

  16 shared

• Anne‐Sophie Crépin

  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

  14 shared

• Scott Barrett

  11 shared

• Catherine L. Kling

  11 shared

• Marca Weinberg

  10 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Riverside

  1973

• B.A.

  California State University, Sonoma

  1970