About

Matt Reimer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on environmental and natural resource economics, with particular emphasis on fisheries, wildfire risk, land-use decisions, and conservation. He employs applied microeconometric and structural methods to study how policy, climate shocks, and institutions influence economic behavior and outcomes.

Research topics

• Economics
• Finance
• Fishery
• Political Science
• Business
• Demographic economics
• Medicine
• Market economy
• Labour economics
• Natural resource economics
• Monetary economics
• Biology
• Public economics

Selected publications

• Fisheries subsidies reform in China

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

  • 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

• Universal Cash Transfers and Labor Market Outcomes

  Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 2022 · 25 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • Demographic economics

  Abstract One major criticism of Universal Basic Income is that unconditional cash transfers discourage recipients from working. Evidence to date has largely relied on targeted and/or conditional transfer programs. However, it is difficult to draw conclusions from such programs because universal transfers may induce a positive demand shock by distributing cash to a large portion of the population, which may in turn offset any negative labor supply responses. We estimate the causal effects of universal cash transfers on short‐run labor market activity by exploiting the timing and variation in size of a long‐running unconditional and universal transfer: Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend. We find evidence of both a positive labor demand and negative labor supply response to the transfers. Small negative effects on the number of hours worked are found for women, especially those with young children. In contrast, we find an increase in the probability of employment for males in the months following the distribution. Altogether, a $1,000 increase in the per‐person disbursement leads to a 0.8 percent labor market contraction on an annual basis.

  DOI

• Commercial fisheries & local economies

  Journal of Environmental Economics and Management · 2021 · 24 citations

  • Fishery
  • Economics
  • Business
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alan C. Haynie

  International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

  17 shared

• Mouhcine Guettabi

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  10 shared

• Daniel K. Lew

  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

  10 shared

• Joshua K. Abbott

  Arizona State University

  7 shared

• James E. Wilen

  7 shared

• James N. Sanchirico

  University of California, Davis

  7 shared

• Charles B. Yackulic

  Southwest Biological Science Center

  6 shared

• Lucas S. Bair

  Southwest Biological Science Center

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Agricultural and Resource Economics

  University of California, Davis

  2012

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