The Economics of Animal Welfare

If non-human animals experience wellbeing and suffering, such welfare consequences arguably should be included in a social welfare evaluation. Yet economic evaluations almost universally ignore non-human animals, in part because axiomatic social choice theory has failed to propose and characterize multi-species social welfare functions. Here we propose axioms and functional forms to fill this gap. We provide a range of alternative representations, characterizing a broad range of possibilities for multi-species social welfare. Among these, we identify a new characterization of additively-separable generalized (multi-species) total utilitarianism. The multi-species setting permits a novel, weak species-level separability axiom with important consequences. We provide examples to illustrate that non-separability across species is implausible in a multi-species setting, in part because good lives for different species are at very different welfare levels. Finally, we explore the consequences for evaluating climate policy and understanding speciesism and non-climate environmental goals, such as biodiversity.

Cost-benefit analysis lacks the appropriate tools to economically value animal well-being. I propose an easily-implementable framework to evaluate the social gains from policies regarding animals. The model considers both the welfare of animals and the utility that humans derive from animal well-being. The gains in animal welfare are estimated by considering the violations of the animals’ fundamental freedoms weighted for each species. I apply this framework to twenty policy proposals targeting wild, domestic, farmed, and laboratory animals. Although the policies benefit from widespread popular support in France (the annual willingnesses-to-pay range between 15 and 39 Euros per person per year), I show that they have very heterogeneous impacts on animal welfare (valued at between 0.013 and 3,618 Euros per person per year). I further show that humans’ altruistic concerns for animals are a poor predictor of the effective impact of policies on animal welfare. I conclude that it is essential to value animal welfare per se in cost-benefit analyses in order to determine the set of welfare-increasing policies.

We study whether new plant-based meat and dairy alternatives and changing policies toward animal welfare affect or can be explained by changing consumer attitudes. We document trends in grocery purchases for different segments of the U.S. population and investigate potential drivers of changing interest in meat, eggs, dairy, and plant-based substitutes in the National Consumer Panel. We initially find little substitution for most consumers. Instead it seems as though the increase in consumption of plant-based alternatives is mainly driven by a small fraction of the population. There is some evidence, however, that this subset of the population is slowly but steadily growing. We plan to complement these descriptive trends with an analysis of how consumption responds to the arrival of novel plant-based substitutes in the grocery store and moving between regions with different consumption patterns. Furthermore, we intend to estimate a learning model to understand how consumers’ beliefs respond to initial purchases of plant-based alternatives.

Can dietary interventions have lasting effects? This study examines the long-term effects of an educational intervention designed to increase awareness about the role of meat consumption in climate change. In a previous paper (Jalil, Tasoff and Vargas Bustamante, 2020), we studied the effects of such an intervention at a residential U.S. college over one full academic year. We found statistically significant dietary shifts: participants reduced their meat consumption in favor of plant-based alternatives. In this study, we extend our analysis up to three years to identify whether dietary shifts persisted in the long term. Our dataset of individual-level food purchases from the college dining facilities, amounting to more than 100,000 meals, allows us to track the behavior of participants over a prolonged period. We find that dietary changes persisted, with no signs of reversal, through all three years. The declines in meat consumption were 4.5, 6.2 and 9.6 percentage points in years 1, 2, and 3, and the increases in veg consumption were 4.1, 4.7, and 6.7 percentage points, respectively, with p-values < 0.01. We link our food purchase and survey data to examine heterogenous treatment effects. Using our dataset, we are also able to estimate the cumulative effects of our educational intervention, in terms of both reducing the carbon footprint of participants’ meals and the number of animals spared from modern industrial factory farming. We present high-quality evidence that a dietary intervention can have long-lasting effects.

Animal agriculture encompasses global markets with large externalities from animal welfare and greenhouse gas emissions. We formally study these social costs by embedding an animal inclusive social welfare function into a climate-economy model that includes an agricultural sector. The total external costs are found to be large under the baseline parameterization. These results are driven by animal welfare costs, which themselves are due to an assumption that animal lives are worse than nonexistence. Though untestable—and perhaps controversial—we find support for this qualitative assumption and demonstrate that our results are robust to a wide range of its quantitative interpretations. Surprisingly, the environmental costs play a comparatively small role, even in sensitivity analyses that depart substantially from our baseline case. For the model to find that beef, a climate-intensive product, has a larger total externality than poultry, an animal-intensive product, we must simultaneously reduce the animal welfare externality to 1% of its baseline level and increase climate damages roughly 35-fold. Correspondingly, the model implies both that the animal agriculture sector is much larger than its optimal level and that considerations across products ought to be dominated by animal welfare, rather than climate, effects.

This paper presents a two-wave survey experiment on self-image concerns in
voting. We elicit votes on a ballot initiative in Switzerland that spurred
campaigns involving widely shared normative values. We investigate how
messages that change the self-signaling value of a Yes vote affect selection and
processing of information, and reported voting behavior. We find that a message
enhancing the self-signaling value of a Yes vote is effective: voters agree more
with arguments in favor of the initiative, anticipate more frequently voting in
favor, and report more frequently having voted in favor of the initiative.

California voters passed Proposition 12 in November 2018 to require more housing space for certain farm animals. We estimate that Prop 12 will cost California pork consumers about $320 million annually due to higher pork prices.