Tyler Cowen recently posted a good question: Why isn’t there an economics of animal welfare field. As someone who has conducted research on this topic for more than a decade, I found the two sentences in Cowen’s post a bit amusing:
“I do understand there is plenty about animal welfare in ag econ journals and departments, but somehow the way the world is tiered that just doesn’t count. Yes that is unfair, but the point remains that this subfield remains an underexploited intellectual profit opportunity.”
My sense is that he means this work doesn’t “count” in the academic status game. Maybe so, but I can assure you that the work agricultural economists have done on the issue has “counted” in the real world of policy, law, farming/ranching, and agribusiness.
If you’re curious about this topic and want an intro to the topic, I can offer some of my co-authored work (mostly led by my colleague Bailey Norwood who suggested we get into this area more than a decade ago).
Norwood, F.B. and J.L. Lusk. Compassion by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Lusk, J.L. and F.B. Norwood. “Animal Welfare Economics.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. 33(2011):463-483.
Lusk, J.L. “The Market for Animal Welfare.” Agricultural and Human Values. 28(2011):561-575.
Norwood, F.B., and J.L. Lusk. “A Calibrated Auction-Conjoint Valuation Method: Valuing Pork and Eggs Produced under Differing Animal Welfare Conditions.” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management. 62(2011):80-94.
Lusk, J.L. and F.B. Norwood. “Speciesism, Altruism, and the Economics of Farm Animal Welfare.” European Review of Agricultural Economics. 39(2012):189-212.
Paul, A.S., J.L. Lusk, F.B. Norwood, and G.T. Tonsor. “An Experiment on the Vote-Buy Gap with Application to Cage-Free Eggs.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics. 79(2019):102-109.
We have published many, many more papers on this topic, but the above gives a good sense of the theoretical and empirical contributions that currently exist. And, of course other economists such as Dan Sumner, Nicolas Treich, Glynn Tonsor, John Bovay have made many excellent contributions as well.
P.S. While not often considered a book on “animal welfare,” I’ve long enjoyed this 1995 book by Kagel, Battalio, and Green entitled Economic Choice Theory: An Experimental Analysis of Animal Behavior