Conferences
The events below represent the growing conversation about the economics of animal welfare and were organized by Animal Welfare Economics Working Group members.
2025 Call for Abstracts: Paris School of Economics
The Animal Welfare Economics Working Group is soliciting 300-word abstracts for its annual interdisciplinary conference on the economics of animal welfare. This in-person event, which is the latest in a series of international events on this topic, will be held on June 10–11, 2025 at the Paris School of Economics.
The Working Group welcomes submissions on any topic that bears on the economics of animal welfare. This includes theoretical research on including losses or benefits to animals in economic analyses, applied empirical work on the effects of policies or industry structure on animal welfare, and anything else within the purview of economics as it relates to the well-being of commodity, companion, or wild animals. (For some examples, see the Working Group’s growing Research Library.)
We invite abstracts from economists and those in relevant fields, including animal welfare science, political science, and philosophy. In addition to full presentations, we also welcome “project pitches” from graduate students and other early career researchers. These pitches are ideas for research projects that can be presented in ten minutes and would benefit from collective feedback.
Please submit an abstract or an idea-in-progress by January 15, 2025 via this form. Acceptances will be communicated by February 15, 2025. General attendance registration will open shortly thereafter.
Insofar as possible, we will cover travel and accommodation costs. During the event, vegan meals will be served for all attendees. A limited number of travel bursaries are available for graduate students to attend without presenting a paper. Please apply for non-speaker travel funding via this form (see Section 2).
2024 - Duke University
Duke University, October 18-19, 2024
The Animal Equality conference was organized by the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy (CLEPP) and co-sponsored by CLEPP and the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program.
Angela Bischof (Northern Arizona University), “Reclaiming Respect: An Indigenous Response to Regan”
Harry Lloyd (Yale University), “Animals, Just Distribution, and Cost Effectiveness”
Russ McIntosh (UC Berkeley), “A Puzzle about Moral Status”
Mark Budolfson (UT Austin), “Creation, Externalities, Different Populations”
Bob Fischer (Texas State University) and Travis Timmerman (Seton Hall University), “Future Animals Make Trouble for Prioritarianism”
Michael A. Livermore (University of Virginia), “Diversity and Distribution: The Case of Non-Human Animals”
Jacob Byl (Western Kentucky University) and Shi-Ling Hsu (Florida State University), “On Animal Status: Value of Statistical Animal Lives Alongside Statistical Human Lives”
Jessica Flanigan (University of Richmond), “The Case for Animal Offsets”
Natalie Jacewicz (UC San Diego), “Why Protect Animal Abundance?"
Jonathan B. Wiener (Duke University), “Animals in Space”
Marcia Condoy (Helsinki), “Animal Legal Agency: Recognizing Animals as Active Legal Subjects”
Sharisse Kanet (Worcester State University), “Participancy: A New Legal Category for Sentient Non-Persons”
Thomas Lininger (University of Oregon), “Animal Privacy”
Jon Garthoff, “Accountability without Equality in Social Relations among Higher Animals”
Adam Lerner (Rutgers University), “Equal in Misery”
Kyle York (University of Colorado Boulder), “Why It’s Probably Wrong to Step on Bugs”
2024 - Brown University
Brown University, July 11-12, 2024
The Economics of Animal Welfare conference was organized by the Animal Welfare Economics Working Group with generous support from Brown University’s Department of Economics and Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
Loren Fryxell (Oxford University), "LELO and XU"
Josh Tasoff (Claremont Graduate University), "Moral Suasion and Moral Preferences"
Emiliano Huet-Vaughn (Pomona College), "Moral Suasion and Moral Preferences"
Romain Espinosa (CNRS), "Animal Quality-Adjusted Life Year - AQALY"
Trevor Woolley (UC Berkeley), "The Social Value of Layer Hen Welfare: Evidence, Beliefs, and Voter Behavior"
Shon Ferguson (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), "The Impact of Animal Welfare Regulations on Pork Trade: Evidence from the European Union"
Jamie McLaughlin (Lewis & Clark), "Facilitating Disease Transmission and GHG Emissions While Taxing Us for the Results"
Wilma Steeneveld (Utrecht University), "Welfare Quantification of Diseased Animals in Dairy Production"
Graduate Student Lightning Talks
Daniel Bressler (Columbia University)
Drew Burd (University of Chicago)
JoJo Lee (Global Priorities Institute)
Aaron Leonard (University of Chicago)
Anya Marchenko (Brown University)
Luis Mota (Northwestern University)
Connor Murphy (University of Chicago)
Jacob Schmiess (Purdue University)
Tyler Cowen (George Mason University), "Reflections on the Future of Animal Advocacy"
2023 - Paris School of Economics
Paris School of Economics, June 8-9, 2023
This Welfare Across Species workshop was organized by the Opening Economics Chair. François Libois, Marc Fleurbaey, Rafael Schütz and Stéphane Zuber facilitated.
Stéphane Zuber (PSE, CNRS), "Separable Social Welfare Functions for Multi-species Populations"
Audrey Maille (MNHN), "Co-existing with Other Primates: Welfare Issues in Captivity and in the Wild"
Walter Veit (University of Bristol), "From Life History Complexity to Welfare Comparisons"
Eleftheria Triviza (University of Mannheim), "Eating Habits, Food Consumption, and Health: The Role of Early Life Experiences"
Matilda Gibbons (University of Pennsylvania), "Can Insects Feel Pain?"
Bob Fischer (Texas State University), "A Method for Making Interspecies Welfare Comparisons"
Lynne Sneddon (University of Gothenburg), "Pain and Sentience in Fishes"
Heather Browning (University of Southampton), "The Underdetermination Problem for Interspecies Welfare Comparisons"
Gilles Boeuf (Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris), "How to Take Animal Behavior into Account?"
Rafael Schütz (PSE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), "Does It Take a Stick to Eat a Carrot? Estimating the Animal Welfare Impacts of Food Consumption and Pigouvian Pricing"
Jonathan Birch (LSE), "Animal Sentience and Interspecies Welfare Comparisons"
Romain Espinosa (CIRED) & Nicolas Treich (TSE), "The Animal Welfare Levy"
Leisha Hewitt (Adelaide University), "Transforming Policy into Meaningful Animal Welfare Improvements"
Kevin Kuruc (University of Texas at Austin), "What Should We Pay to Avert the Life of a Farmed Animal?"
Nicolas Delon (New College of Florida), "Agency and Welfare across Species"
2022 - Stanford University
Stanford University, July 12, 2022
This Economics of Animal Welfare conference was hosted by SITE and was organized by Marc Fleurbaey (Paris School of Economics), Caroline Hoxby (Stanford University), Lisa Kramer (University of Toronto), Nicolas Treich (Toulouse School of Economics), and Zach Freitas-Groff (Stanford University).
Dean Spears (University of Texas at Austin), Stephane Zuber (Paris School of Economics), and Mark B. Budolfson (Rutgers University), "Separable Social Welfare Evaluation for Multi-Species Populations"
Romain Espinosa (CNRS), "Animals and Social Welfare"
Zach Freitas-Groff (Stanford University) and Carl Meyer (Stanford University), "The Inelasticity of Meat Consumption"
Andrew Jalil (Occidental College), Joshua Tasoff (Claremont Graduate University), and Arturo Vargas-Bustamante (University of California, Los Angeles), "Diet Change for Good: The Long-Term Effects of a Climate-Change Educational Intervention"
Kevin Kuruc (The University of Oklahoma) and Jonathan McFadden (USDA), "Monetizing the Externalities of Animal Agriculture: Insights from an Inclusive Welfare Function"
Stephanie Wang (University of Pittsburgh), Lydia Mechtenberg (University of Hamburg), Grischa Perino (University of Hamburg), Nicolas Treich (University Toulouse Capitole), and Jean-Robert Tyran (University of Vienna), "Self-Signaling in Voting"
Daniel Sumner (UC Davis), Hanbin Lee (UC Davis), and Richard Sexton (UC Davis), "Voter-Approved Proposition to Raise California Pork Prices"
2019 - Duke University
Duke University, November 1-2, 2019
This Animals and Social Welfare conference was organized by Matthew Adler and was hosted by Duke's Center for Law, Economics, and Public Policy.
Matthew Adler (Duke University), "Animal Well-Being and the Frameworks of Welfare Economics"
Mark Budolfson (University of Texas at Austin), "Valuing Animal Welfare in Policy and Decision Models"
Eden Lin (The Ohio State University), "Variabilism and Cross-Species Welfare Comparisons"
Adam Shriver (Drake University), "Interspecies Comparisons of Suffering"
Paula Casal (Pompeu Fabra University), "The Conditional Value of Tradition"
Nicolas Treich (Toulouse School of Economics), "Animal Welfare: Antispeciesism, Veganism, and a Life Worth Living"
Martin Van der Linden (Emory University), "If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You Eat Meat?"
Olof Johansson-Stenman (University of Gothenburg), "Endogenous Ethics and Cultured Meat"
Sarah Hannan (University of Manitoba), "What Can Theories of Children's Well-being Tell Us about Non-human Animal Well-being?"
David Plunkett (Dartmouth University), "Well-Being, Equality, and Conceptual Engineering"
Marc Fleurbaey (Paris School of Economics) and Christy Leppanen (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), "Toward a Theory of Ecosystem Well-Being"
Dean Spears (University of Texas at Austin), "Animals and Separability of Social Welfare"
Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University), "Farm Animal Welfare"
Martin Smith (Duke University), "The Future of Global Seafood Markets"
Jeff Sebo (New York University), "Animal Welfare and the Problem of Other Minds"
Ron Kagan (Detroit Zoological Society), "Ethics and Economics: How to Consider and Calculate Captive Exotic Animal Welfare"
