Animal Welfare Economics Working Group

The Animal Welfare Economics Working Group coordinates and supports a growing field that studies animal welfare with the tools of economics.

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Call for Abstracts! 📢

The AWE Working Group invites abstract and ideas-in-progress submissions for our next #AnimalWelfare Economics Conference, to be held June 29–30, 2026 at @UofC.

Submit here ➡️ https://t.co/Y84QHxyv8h

#EconTwitter #AcademicTwitter #EconResearch

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

📢Online Workshop Announcement 📢

SBCA's Animal Welfare & Benefit-Cost Analysis

📅 Oct 16–17, 2025
⏰ 10am–1:30pm ET

Experts will share tools, insights, and case studies on integrating #AnimalWelfare into policy analysis.

🔗 Register: https://t.co/74H7LubxtU

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

New @WorldBank blog post discussing the recent paper “The Animal-Welfare Levy” by Romain Espinosa & Nicolas Treich—an important contribution to field of #AnimalWelfareEcon

Both authors serve on our advisory board!

📖 Read here: https://t.co/t4gZngcNq8

#EconTwitter

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Register here: https://t.co/QhfJjaVRif

Tentative schedule: https://t.co/pFHepdYmS4

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

🗓️ Save the date!

Our 2025 #AnimalWelfare Economics Conference will be held June 10–11 at the Paris School of Economics.

This free, public event brings together researchers advancing the economics of animal welfare.

Registration info & tentative program below!

#EconTwitter

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Across a range of reasonable parameterizations, animal welfare costs substantially outweigh environmental costs

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Kevin Kuruc and Jonathan McFadden adopt an animal-inclusive social welfare function to study the relative contributions of environmental and animal impacts to the external costs of animal agriculture

https://t.co/W93X1yUWnB

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Submissions are due in less than a month!

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

The next annual Economics of Animal Welfare Conference will be held from June 10–11, 2025 at the Paris School of Economics. You can find the call for abstracts below, with submissions due by January 15. We look forward to seeing you there!

https://t.co/m9mpu5tbzb

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

The Animal Welfare Economics (AWE) Working Group is hiring a part-time research assistant! Please share with your network and apply if you are interested. You can learn more here: https://t.co/kr2QUDy98k

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Do these results imply that consumers are avoiding *new* information? Or, are they simply avoiding painful *reminders* of information they've already encountered?

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Buechel, @BenedicteDroz, and Nassar study how meat consumption impacts information avoidance

https://t.co/XYPH1xGdJM

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

These avoidance effects depend on both the type of meat and the type of information.

Curiously, there is no difference between treatment and control in avoidance of information about the animal welfare impacts of beef consumption.

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

@KennyTorrella We're grateful to hear that! (cc: @yoursTWoolley and @zdgroff)

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Growth in aggregate meat consumption masks divergence in household-level meat consumption. @zdgroff, @yoursTWoolley, and Carl Meyer decompose trends in aggregate meat consumption in a recent working paper (https://t.co/tPXkGlMVjU).

[Kenny Torrella @KennyTorrella]

@AnimalEcon This tweet inspired me to take a look at the paper and today I published a story on it :-) https://t.co/uIQvdZgl8Z

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

If such motives are substantially stronger at the ballot box, are ballot initiatives a commitment device for (relatively more) pro-animal purchasing decisions?

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

Mechtenberg, @Treich13 et al. show that information increasing the self-signaling value of voting for animal welfare initiatives increases support for such initiatives
(https://t.co/VfaWQvkwZf…)

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

The authors send a message to voters about evidence for the claim that “good-hearted people tend to be good to animals.” Are these self-signaling motives strong enough to transfer to purchasing and eating decisions?

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

The paper highlights 2 countervailing forces that will determine the path of aggregate meat consumption: (1) rising abstinence and (2) rising consumption (conditional on purchasing meat).

[Animal Welfare Economics Working Group @AnimalEcon]

And the variance in household meat consumption is increasing