Autor: Sosa Raúl Alberto, Vazquez Franco Martín
Institución: UdeSA
Año: 2025
JEL: C61, Q18
Resumen:
Minimum slaughter-age (or weight) rules delay harvest rather than tax quantities. We develop a continuous-time model of cattle as biological capital that maps slaughter age into harvest flow through a decreasing harvest fraction. The model yields closed-form steady states with and without a binding floor and characterizes the optimal transition after repeal. A binding floor necessarily enlarges the herd and lowers the marginal value of stock; long-run beef supply is non-monotone in the tightness of the floor—moderate floors can raise throughput, while strict floors reduce it. Repeal generates an immediate slaughter surge and monotone convergence back to the interior allocation. The framework is robust to preferences, biological growth, age-specific survival, and holding costs, and it delivers a simple sufficient-statistic measure of the policy’s dynamic efficiency cost.