Yim, H. and Katare, B. (2023). Effect of Food Safety Recalls on Consumer Meat Purchase. European Review of Agricultural Economics.
Abstract: Food safety is a global public health concern, and food recalls cause several foodborne illnesses and significant costs to human health. We estimate the impact of meat recalls on consumer meat purchases in the U.S. using household- and store-level scanner data. Meat recalls have a statistically significant but short-lived and small reduction in consumer meat purchases, suggesting economically small impacts on the intensive (how much to decrease) and extensive (whether to purchase) margins. There is heterogeneity in consumer recall response across household demographic and recall characteristics. Results provide insight to domestic and international policymakers and industry stakeholders about food safety.
This paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/erae/jbac032
Katare, B., Yim, H., Byrne, A., Wang, H. H., & Wetzstein, M. (2022). Consumer willingness to pay for environmentally sustainable meat and a plant‐based meat substitute. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy.
Abstract: We investigate consumers' willingness to pay premiums for environmentally sustainably produced meat and plant-based meat substitutes. We conducted a randomized control study coupled with an incentive-compatible experimental auction. Treatment consisted of information nudges concerning the environmental and health externalities of meat production and consumption. Results show that demand for sustainably produced beef and a plant-based meat substitute is inelastic. We elicited participants' time preferences to analyze whether consumer behavior varies with their time preferences. Present-biased treated female participants were willing to pay a significantly lower premium for sustainably produced beef compared to the present-biased control female participants. Future-biased treated participants had a higher probability of being willing to pay a premium for a plant-based meat substitute compared to the control group. We discuss the policy implications and relevance of information nudging, such as labeling, and how the effect of such nudging varies with participant characteristics.
The paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13285
Does Increasing Minimum Wage Impact Service Quality? Evidence from Restaurant Food Safety Inspections. with Hyejin Yim, Bhagyashree Katare, Joel Cuffey
This paper examines whether a wage increase affects the customer service quality provided by low-wage employees and if there are any spillover effects from a wage increase on service quality offered by employers. We use restaurant-level food safety inspections and leverage a large number of jurisdiction-level minimum wage changes between 2010 and 2019. We find that wage increase reduces overall restaurant violations and improves service quality. These results are mainly driven by the decrease in employee-associated violations. Employer-associated severe violations, that can cause adverse consumer health outcomes, increase in response to a wage increase.
This paper was presented at the 2022 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) Annual Meeting, Anaheim, CA.
Minimum Wages and Food Safety: Evidence from the US Meat and Poultry Industry.
with Hyejin Yim and Bhagyashree Katare
First Draft Date: 09/01/2021
Meat and poultry processing plants are labor-intensive industries, and their performance is highly dependent on worker productivity. Workers in this industry have lower wages and a higher rate of injury and sickness as compared to other industries in the manufacturing sector (Hoff, 2021). The industry employs approximately 600,000 workers who generally come from low-income families (Fremstad et al., 2020). There is a high prevalence of employee turnover in the meat packaging and processing industry due to lower wages, lower status, stressful and hazardous working conditions, longer working hours, and non-existent career development. In low-wage paying labor-intensive service industries, an increase in wages improves worker’s quality of service, productivity, and retention (Ruffini, 2021; Yim et al., 2022). Whether an increase in wages can improve worker output in the manufacturing industry remains an open question. This project will broaden the understanding of whether an increase in worker wages in meat and poultry processing plants will improve their productivity and output quality.
In meat and poultry processing plants, a considerable proportion of the manufacturing, production, and management workers’ hours are spent on tasks related to food safety and compliance (Antlers, 2000). We measure worker productivity or quality of output by using the compliance rates from the meat and poultry product inspection (MPI) reports. MPI is conducted regularly for all licensed meat and poultry processing plants by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). To cleanly identify the effect of wage increase on worker productivity, we leverage the exogenous statutory minimum wage increases at the state and city level ordinances from 2010 to 2019, as they provide rich temporal and spatial variation in minimum wages.
Increase in wages improves employee productivity (Shapiro and Stiglitz, 1984), cognitive function (Mani et al., 2013), and retention (Dube et al., 2016), which may positively affect the quality of output. We hypothesize that a minimum wage increase influences worker food safety behavior and productivity, leading to improved food safety compliance. We test this hypothesis by using compliance rates from MPIs, which show whether plants complied with Sanitation Performance Standards (SPS), Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures (SSOP), and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) standards. Literature on worker’s quality of output and food safety behavior has widely used inspection outcomes as a proxy for worker output quality since they provide quantitative and standardized measures (Giupponi and Machin, 2018; Ruffini, 2021; Yim et al., 2022).
We use MPI reports obtained from the FSIS for the years 2010 and 2019. We have obtained these reports from FSIS through Freedom of Information Act request. MPIs are conducted daily by FSIS inspectors at the meat and poultry processing plants to ensure the implementation of food safety tasks, and whether plants follow the food safety task standards. MPI reports include demographic and inspection information about the meat and poultry processing plants, such as inspection data, inspection type, plant name, plant type, and geographical location. MPI reports also show whether plants complied with each food safety task standard. Using this information, we construct four main outcomes at a monthly level for each plant: compliance rates of 1) all tasks, 2) SPS tasks, 3) SSOP tasks, and 4) HACCP tasks. The compliance rate is calculated as the total number of compliance inspections for a particular task divided by the total number of inspections.
We also use the minimum wage made available by Vaghul and Zipperer (2022). Based on the plant locations, we match corresponding city-, county-, state-, and federal-level minimum wages with the MPI reports to create a balanced plant-by-month level panel dataset. In total, there are 8,354 unique meat and poultry processing plants in the 48 contiguous US states and the District of Columbia, with 4,689,097 monthly inspection results
The minimum wage policies vary by jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions increase their minimum wages annually or gradually, while others increase their minimum wages as a one-time event or fix at the federal level. Given the variation in minimum wage policies, we implement a two-way fixed effects model to estimate the effect of minimum wage on food safety task compliance at meat and poultry processing plants. We also implement a distributed lag model to account for the dynamic relationship between the minimum wage and task compliance rates over time (Meer and West, 2016). It is likely that the minimum wage impacts over time through adjustments in worker behaviors rather than discrete behavior changes. Thus, we estimate the cumulative effect of minimum wages on food safety task compliance over time using the distributed lag model.