Three of Professor Wilen's students (including current and former editors of MRE) introduce the paper like this:
Throughout his career, James E. (Jim) Wilen has had a remarkable influence on the development of resource and fisheries economics through his path-breaking research contributions, influence on fisheries policy, and outstanding legacy as a mentor. “Common Property Resources and the Dynamics of Overexploitation: The Case of the North Pacific Fur Seal” was one of Jim’s earliest research endeavors as a young assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. Yet, it reflects many of the essential themes found in so much of his subsequent work. In publishing this paper in Marine Resource Economics, we hope to not only make it more accessible to a whole new generation of resource economists, but also to examine the impact of this unpublished mimeograph on the subsequent development of resource and fisheries economics. ...
Indeed, to our knowledge, Jim’s paper was the first paper to econometrically model both the economic and resource dynamics for a single resource.
This is the second time, to my knowledge, that MRE has made an effort to publish an unpublished paper (here is the first). This is quite remarkable and deserving of a pat on the back.
