California’s Proposition 12 imposed retail-level animal-confinement requirements (ACL) on
pork sold in the state beginning in January 2024. We combine two empirical strategies to
estimate the impacts of Proposition 12 along the pork supply chain and consumers. First, we
estimate a linear-approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (LA-AIDS) using pre-policy data to
recover the full demand elasticity matrix and derive welfare measures. Second, we employ a
vertical supply-chain decomposition that links wholesale ACL premiums from the USDA
Livestock Mandatory Reporting (LMR) database to retail scanner data, allowing us to estimate
the pass-through rate and quantify the economic burden borne at each stage of the supply chain.
