The Impact of Firm Consolidation on Workers’ Compensation: Evidence from U.S. Poultry Processing
Aleks Schaefer and Pian Chen | June 8, 2026
For most of the history of U.S. antitrust enforcement, merger review has been framed primarily as a question of consumer welfare. The central inquiries have concerned whether a merged firm would raise prices, whether product or service quality would decline, and whether new entry would discipline post-merger conduct. Workers, on the other side of the firm's market, have received comparatively little attention. The 2023 Merger Guidelines, issued jointly by the FTC and the DOJ, formally incorporated labor-market effects as a component of merger review. This new requirement has created demand for rigorous empirical evidence on how mergers and consolidation affect labor markets.