Animal Disease and the Industrialization of Agriculture
研究了动物农业工业化与动物健康市场的相互影响，发现动物疾病外部性导致农场增加存栏量但减少进入，抗生素促进集约化，生物安全投入可能像吉芬商品一样行为。
The industrialization of animal agriculture has fundamentally transformed animal health markets while animal health innovations have promoted this industrialization. The subtlety of these interactions shows how little we know about agricultural industrialization. To illustrate, we consider three stylized features of industrialized animal agriculture. These are the closing off of production activities from external effects, emphasis on control, and use of biosecurity measures. We find that animal disease externalities should lead to higher stocking on any given farm, and also to deficient entry into animal production. Eradicating the disease in a region increases both the stocking rate per farm and the number of farms. We show that antibiotics as a control strategy should promote intensity of production and the substitution of capital for labor. Also, in long-run market equilibrium a reduction in the price of a biosecurity input could plausibly reduce both operation scale and per-animal input use, i.e., biosecurity inputs can behave like a Giffen good. External biosecurity inputs provided through public animal disease management policy may promote on-farm biosecurity, rather than crowd it out.