RESEARCH
Works in Progress
The Social Value of Animal Welfare: A Revealed Policy Preference Approach
[Job Market Paper]
+/- Abstract
How much are people willing to pay for moral or ethical public goods–such as improved farm
animal welfare–after accounting for their private consumption benefits? This paper introduces a
revealed-preference framework to estimate a demand curve for such policies by merging regional
referendum results of a real policy with local market data. I focus on California’s Proposition
12 (2018), which banned the in-state sale of eggs from caged hens by 2024. The policy passed
by a wide margin despite increasing egg prices for a large majority of voters. I develop a
structural model in which heterogeneous voters trade off expected price increases against their
total willingness to pay (WTP) for the policy. By exploiting cross-precinct variation in expected
consumer costs–constructed from scanner-based consumption patterns and local price markups–
I recover the distribution of total WTP across the electorate. I then separately identify private
(use) WTP using a discrete choice demand model estimated on retail scanner data, and compute
non-use WTP as a residual.
I find that a substantial portion of voter support for Prop 12 reflects non-use values–
willingness to pay for animal welfare improvements independent of personal consumption–
suggesting that animal welfare may be a public good from consumers’ perspectives and therefore
systematically under-provided if left entirely to market interactions. My strategy relies on four
key assumptions: (i) rational voter expectations, (ii) accurate measurement of private costs by
the analyst, (iii) the Median Voter Theorem, and (iv) IID sampling of representative voters
from the target constituent population. I use rich administrative and scanner data to present
supporting evidence of rational voter expectations, demonstrating vote share price sensitivity
across precincts and post-policy price predictability. I address the other premises using bounding
assumptions, sensitivity analyses, and descriptive statistics from the voting data. Ultimately,
my results provide the first estimates of non-use WTP for farm animal welfare outside of a lab
setting and offer a general framework for measuring demand for moral or ethical goods using
public referenda.
(with Zach Freitas-Groff and Carl Meyer)
[Revision Requested: European Economic Review]
+/- Abstract
The past decades have seen a number of new policies and food technology businesses concerned with alleviating animal welfare or environmental impacts of animal agriculture. We study whether there is evidence that consumer behavior is changing in parallel by examining real grocery purchases matched with machine-scanned label data. We find that meat consumption has been at its highest in recent years, consistent with prior observations, but we offer the first observational evidence that a growing share of the population is purchasing less or no meat and other animal products. While some of this trend can be explained by changes in the volume of grocery purchases, we suggest that media and generational turnover are further driving this trend. We finally discuss the plausible effects of meat alternatives, finding that while they affect meat consumption at a low volume now, they could play a major role in the future.
Media coverage: Vox
A Scoping Review of (Dis-)Incentives for Welfare-improving Farming Practices
(with Sharon Pailler, Jon McFadden, Sharon Raszap, Zach Raff, Kevin Kuruc)
[submitted]
+/- Abstract
To identify factors that are associated with farmer decisions to employ humane farm practices, we perform a scoping review of academic literature. Guided by topical analysis performed by a latent derelict allocation (LDA) machine learning model, we identify factors mentioned in the literature as being relevant to both animal welfare and producer decisions. Informed by this model, we categorize these factors as motivators for or barriers to the use of more humane farm practices.
Wildfire Zoning and Heterogeneous Responses to Wildfire Events: Evidence from the California Housing Market
(with Matthew Wibbenmeyer)
+/- Abstract
Do wildfires alter local demographics? Employing event study and difference-in-differences strategies, we study the effect of 192 large wildfire events (2016-2018) on nearby house transaction prices and quantities to identify heterogeneity in real estate market responses across Fire Hazard Severity Zones (FHSZ) mapped by the state in 2011. We find that post-wildfire sellers in "very high" FHSZ have significantly lower incomes than before, whereas post-wildfire sellers outside of any FHSZ (non-FHSZ) have the same income levels as before. Meanwhile, post-wildfire buyers have lower incomes than before regardless of zone. Controlling for house characteristics, home prices in "very high" FHSZ are unaffected by a nearby fire, however the types of homes sold in these areas after a fire are of a significantly lower quality relative to before. In contrast, home prices in non-FHSZ areas decrease after a nearby fire by more than 14 percent and remain low for at least a year, but the quality of homes sold in these areas remains the same as before. We rationalize these findings by calibrating a model of seller/buyer behavior that incorporates decreasing relative risk aversion and treats wildfires as information shocks.
No Ethical Consumption Under General Equilibrium? Evidence from the US Meat Market
(with Christoph Semken)
+/- Abstract
Many consumers engage in ethical consumption, altering their consumption choices so as to mitigate their personal contributions to negative externalities such as climate change, animal welfare, or pollution. But do individual consumption choice have any impact on overall externalities in a competitive market? In this paper, we estimate the effect of consumption changes on externalities in general equilibrium for the U.S. meat market. We derive sufficient statistics based on the demand and supply cross-price elasticities of all goods with externalities. We estimate the cross-price elasticities using home scanner data and farmer surveys, respectively, and derive the effect of ethical meat consumption on animal welfare. We further show that the effect on other externalities can be estimated using bounding assumptions on substitution patterns. Using such assumptions, we additionally estimate the effect of ethical meat consumption on overall greenhouse gas emissions
Published Work
(with Alex Hoagland)
Contemporary Economic Policy, 2018
Other Work
(with Ethan Ligon)
GiveWell "Change Our Mind Contest" Honorable Mention, 2022
