The Origins of State Pure Food Regulation
研究了19世纪末美国州政府为何开始监管食品行业，发现监管更可能是为了解决食品市场中的信息不对称问题，而非传统生产者的寻租行为。
Why did state governments begin to regulate the food industry in the late nineteenth century? One possible explanation is that pure food regulation was the result of rent seeking on the part of traditional food producers who wanted to limit the availability of new substitutes. Another potential hypothesis is that regulation was desired because it helped solve an asymmetric information problem in the market for food products. I find the evidence to be more consistent with the latter hypothesis.