The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 relaxed restrictions on pricing and eased abandonment procedures in the railroad industry. Although the Act made virtually no reference to labor, its impact on labor has been dramatic. The long-term contraction of industry employment accelerated quite sharply after...

We use data from a recent national survey to analyze the use of sub-therapeutic antibiotics (STAs) among broiler growers. We estimate that 42% of growers do not use STAs in their feed or water, and instead rely on a set of other practices, including pathogen testing, expanded sanitary protocols,...

Beefpacking underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1970s and 1980s, as plants got much larger and industry concentration rose dramatically. We use individual Census Bureau plant records to analyze the sources of the transformation. We find that there were modest but extensive scale economies...

We use establishment based panel data to estimate a cost function which identifies the role of scale economies in hog slaughter consolidation. We find modest but extensive technological scale economies in the 1990s, and they became more important over time. But wages rose sharply with plant size...