Policy Research
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CPAW conducts research on issues including quantifying animal welfare for policy analysis, developing methods for incorporating animal welfare into benefit-cost frameworks, and establishing approaches for comparing welfare across species.
Recent Projects
Animal Economics: Directly and Indirectly Accounting for Animal Welfare
Nicolas Treich | Cambridge University Press (2025)
Why does animal welfare matter? For some, it is because people care about animals; for others, it is because animals themselves are morally relevant. Given the importance of welfare in economics research and the debates around climate change and biodiversity loss, more economists are becoming interested in the economics of animal welfare. Animal Economics provides a general introduction to this new field. It explores the complexity of the behavioral attitude of humans toward animals using behavioral economics and explains how existing economic theory can be applied to understand animal welfare as an externality. Combining theory and empirical research to address key issues in animal welfare, including ethical perspectives, public opinion, market demand, and policy design, this book builds on economics principles to explore how to implement optimal policies that reflect human proanimal concerns and the moral status of animals.
Animal welfare: Methods to improve policy and practice
Mark Budolfson, Bob Fischer, and Noah Scovronick | Science (2023)
This policy forum article examines the growing need for quantitative tools to incorporate animal welfare into policy analysis. While well-developed methods exist for assessing human welfare impacts, comparable tools for animal welfare remain in early stages of development. The authors highlight emerging approaches to quantify human and animal welfare on a common scale, enabling policymakers to make informed and transparent trade-offs across domains including food systems and biomedical research. The article calls for best-practice methods to integrate animal welfare considerations into decision analyses.
Weighing Animal Welfare: Comparing Well-Being Across Species
Edited by Bob Fischer | Oxford University Press (2024)
This volume addresses a critical gap in animal welfare science: how to make principled comparisons of welfare across different species. Such comparisons are essential for policy decisions—determining whether to prioritize pig welfare over chicken welfare, assessing which fish species suffer most in aquaculture, or evaluating trade-offs between human and animal interests. The book reports results from a 20-month interdisciplinary collaboration among philosophers, neuroscientists, comparative psychologists, and animal welfare scientists who developed a shared methodology for interspecies welfare comparisons and applied it to generate proof-of-concept results. This open access volume provides both theoretical framework and practical application for comparing well-being across species.
Monetizing Animal Welfare Impacts for Benefit–Cost Analysis
Mark Budolfson, Romain Espinosa, Bob Fischer, and Nicolas Treich | Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis (2024)
This article presents a framework for incorporating the intrinsic value of animal welfare into economic decision-making. The authors propose extending established human health valuation methods through two key innovations: Animal Quality-Adjusted Life Years (AQALYs) that measure welfare impacts on animals, and welfare potential estimates that enable conversion between animal and human welfare on a common scale. The authors discuss methodological challenges and outline a research agenda for developing these approaches to support policy analysis across domains including food systems, biomedical research, and conservation.
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