Stock Price Reaction to Regulation in the Meat Packing Industry

Abstract

The results of this study suggest that a variety of regulations in the meat packing industry had significant, and sometimes unexpected, effects. The specific results of regulatory event testing show that many regulatory changes produce large significant impacts on the meat processing industry, in this study shown to be as large as 4% of shareholder wealth for a single informational event. The effects of each specific regulatory change on shareholders is dependent upon the type of regulation examined. These large impacts on the wealth of shareholders indicate that regulatory agencies and the regulations they create often serve the industry, as well as consumers. Finally, in this paper a refined Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) analysis that adjusts for an errors-in-variables problem arising due to nonsynchronous trading is utilized which may be useful in future event studies relating to the agricultural sector.