AbstractPacific salmon have always been a lucrative commodity in Alaska history. The primary contribution of this paper is to assess the effects of statewide policy changes such as the 1959 Alaska Statehood and the 1974 Limited Entry Act on the harvest of Pacific salmon in Alaska, controlling for changes in oceanic environmental conditions such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. An autoregressive distributed lag approach is employed to annual time‐series data for 1899–1996. We find that, while the 1974 Limited Entry Act has a significant effect on Alaska salmon harvests, the 1959 Alaska Statehood had little impact. In addition, the oceanic environment has an important determinant of long‐run Alaska salmon harvests.