Delaying Cattle Slaughter: Dynamic Efficiency and Transition under Minimum Age Rules

Raúl Alberto Sosa and Franco Martín Vazquez

No 4840, Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política

Abstract: Minimum slaughter-age (or weight) rules delay harvest rather than tax quantities. We develop a continuous-time model of cattle as biological capital that maps slaughter age into harvest flow through a decreasing harvest fraction. The model yields closed-form steady states with and without a binding floor and characterizes the optimal transition after repeal. A binding floor necessarily enlarges the herd and lowers the marginal value of stock; long-run beef supply is non-monotone in the tightness of the floor—moderate floors can raise throughput, while strict floors reduce it. Repeal generates an immediate slaughter surge and monotone convergence back to the interior allocation. The framework is robust to preferences, biological growth, age-specific survival, and holding costs, and it delivers a simple sufficient-statistic measure of the policy’s dynamic efficiency cost.

JEL-codes: C61 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2025-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://aaep.org.ar/works/works2025/4840.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aep:anales:4840

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Asociación Argentina de Economía Política: Working Papers from Asociación Argentina de Economía Política Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Juan Manuel Quintero ().