A trip to reach the target? - The labor supply of Swedish Baltic cod fishermen

This paper uses logbook data from Swedish Baltic Sea cod trawlers to investigate the revenue target hypothesis. Incomes from fishing can be highly variable and difficult to predict and it is possible that fishermen set specific revenue targets for their fishing trips to simplify decision making. In this paper a discrete choice stopping model is used where the fishermen must decide to stop or continue fishing after each haul. At average trip length, the results indicate that when revenues are higher than expected, fishermen are more likely to return to port. This is in line with the revenue target hypothesis. When using estimated revenue targets the results suggest that the effect of getting higher revenues than expected is stronger when the targets have been reached.