IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/ajagec/v100y2018i2p414-433..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Pass or Fail: Economic Incentives to Reduce Salmonella Contamination in Ground Beef Sold to the National School Lunch Program

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Ollinger
  • John Bovay

Abstract

Ground beef sold to the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) for distribution to the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) must meet stringent food-safety standards, specifically, a zero-tolerance standard for Salmonella. We use a unique data set containing information on Salmonella levels in order to examine the sequential decisions of ground-beef plants to become registered as AMS suppliers and then bid on contracts to supply the NSLP from 2006 to 2012. We find that plants exploit their competitive advantages in relatively high productivity and strong performance on Salmonella tests when choosing to bid on contracts in a given year. Furthermore, the incentives generated by the zero-tolerance standard for Salmonella are highly effective: ground beef supplied to the NSLP is 21–22 percentage points more likely to meet a zero-tolerance standard for Salmonella than ground beef tested as part of typical meat-plant inspections.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Ollinger & John Bovay, 2018. "Pass or Fail: Economic Incentives to Reduce Salmonella Contamination in Ground Beef Sold to the National School Lunch Program," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 100(2), pages 414-433.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:100:y:2018:i:2:p:414-433.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ajae/aax088
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ollinger, Michael & Houser, Matthew, 2020. "Ground beef recalls and subsequent food safety performance," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 97(C).
    2. Michael Ollinger & John Bovay, 2020. "Producer Response to Public Disclosure of Food‐Safety Information," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 102(1), pages 186-201, January.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:ajagec:v:100:y:2018:i:2:p:414-433.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.