The Global Competition for Wild Fish Resources between Livestock and Aquaculture

Aquaculture satisfies a growing global demand for fish but also consumes an increasing share of the world’s wild fish resources. This has led to a concern that increased aquaculture production poses a threat to the sustainability of capture fisheries. We use a shrinkage estimator to estimate fishmeal demand from countries with different make‐up of meat and farmed salmon production. Although we are not able to identify structural differences between these sectors, the empirical results show that fishmeal demand is price inelastic. Technological change, however, is reducing fishmeal usage in feeds, suggesting that strong demand pressure on pelagic fish resources targeted for fishmeal is a temporary phenomenon.     

Regime Shifts in the Fish Meal/Soybean Meal Price Ratio

Aquaculture growth has led to worries about overfishing and reduction in wild‐caught food fish supply because of increased demand for fish meal. As such, the price ratio between fish meal and soybean meal has received much attention as an indicator of changing market conditions. In recent years, the price ratio between these two commodities has become more volatile. Several authors have suggested that the traditional relationship between fish meal and soybean meal has broken down and that this is evidence of increased demand pressure on fish meal. In this article, we investigate the hypothesis that there are two regimes for the relative price between fish meal and soybean meal. The empirical results support this hypothesis, with the low‐price regime representing the traditional stable relative price. The continued linkages between the fish meal and the soybean meal markets indicate that aquaculture is reducing its dependency on marine proteins in favour of vegetable proteins.     

Technical efficiency of Norwegian banks: The non-parametric approach to efficiency measurement

The nonparametric frontier methodology is applied to a sample of banks, where output levels are measured either by the number of accounts and their average size, or by the total balances of the accounts. The efficiency rankings of individual banks are found to depend substantially on our choice of output metric, whereas the estimated size of potential productivity improvements in the banking sector are less affected. The results on economies of scale are also largely unchanged.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through S. Grosskopf.     

An experimental study of prosocial motivation among criminals

The fact that criminal behavior typically has negative consequences for others provides a compelling reason to think that criminals lack prosocial motivation. This paper reports the results from two dictator game experiments designed to study the prosocial motivation of criminals. In a lab experiment involving prisoners, we find a striking similarity in the prosocial behavior of criminals and non-criminals, both when they interact with criminals and when they interact with non-criminals. Similarly, in an Internet experiment on a large sample from the general population, we find no difference in the prosocial behavior of individuals with and without a criminal record. We argue that our findings provide evidence of criminals being as prosocially motivated as non-criminals in an important type of distributive situations.