Overview
Smith studies the economics of the oceans, including fisheries, marine ecosystems, seafood markets, and coastal climate adaptation. He has written on a range of policy-relevant topics, including economics of marine reserves, seasonal closures in fisheries, ecosystem-based management, catch shares, nutrient pollution, aquaculture, genetically modified foods, the global seafood trade, organic agriculture, coastal property markets, and coastal responses to climate change. He is best known for identifying unintended consequences of marine and coastal policies that ignore human behavioral feedbacks. Smith’s methodological interests span micro-econometrics, optimal control theory, time series analysis, and numerical modeling of coupled human-natural systems. Smith’s published work appears in The American Economic Review, Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, the Review of Economics and Statistics, and a number of other scholarly journals that span environmental economics, fisheries science, marine policy, ecology, and the geo-sciences. Smith has received national and international awards, including the Quality of Research Discovery from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, Outstanding Article in Marine Resource Economics, and an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Research Council of Norway. Smith has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Marine Resource Economics, Co-Editor of the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. He served as a member of the Scientific and Statistical Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council and currently serves on the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academies.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Existing seafood traceability tools are insufficient for enforcing import restrictions
Journal Article NPJ Ocean Sustainability · December 1, 2025 Traceability is critical for achieving seafood sustainability goals. However, trade restrictions highlight challenges for identifying basic information, including country of harvest. We use new seafood trade data to illustrate how trade can elude enforceme ... Full text CiteBiological control of a parasite: The efficacy of cleaner fish in salmon farming
Journal Article Ecological Economics · January 1, 2025 Managing pathogens is a challenge in biological production processes. To manage private risks and reduce externalities, biological controls leverage the technology of natural ecosystems and are often considered environmentally friendly alternatives to chem ... Full text CiteNon-parametric tests of behavior in the commons
Journal Article Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization · August 1, 2024 Commons problems present behavioral dilemmas, with tensions between individual and collective rationality. When users of a common-pool resource are not effectively excluded, the collective behavior of individuals pursuing their self-interests dissipates ec ... Full text CiteRecent Grants
CoPe: RCN: Building a Collaboratory for Coastal Adaptation over Space and Time (C-CoAST)
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill · 2020 - 2024CNH-L: Climate Change Adaptation in a Coupled Geomorphic-Economic Coastal System with Heterogeneous Climate Beliefs
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by University of North Carolina - Wilmington · 2017 - 2022Property Rights and the Value of Marine Natural Capital: A Comparative Study of Three Property Rights-based Management Systems in Fisheries
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Knobloch Family Foundation · 2019 - 2021View All Grants