The decision to adopt food standards can be framed as a
case of new technology adoption. Underpinned by concerns
about economic growth and poverty reduction, technology
adoption models have analyzed how new plant varieties or
production techniques are adopted by farmers (Conley &
Udry, 2010; Foster & Rosenzweig, 1995; Suri, 2011). However,
just as for the food standards literature, a focus on mean
impact has left out the possibility of heterogeneous wealth impacts
in the adoption of new technologies. We therefore
believe our analysis of the distribution of the gain from
applying food standards on farmers’ wellbeing is also
contributing to the technology adoption literature.
We estimate the distributional impact of food standards on
consumption expenditure using an original dataset from the
Vietnamese pangasius value chain. 2 To overcome the pervasive
endogeneity problems present in this kind of impact estimations
with substantial self-selection we use an instrumental
variable quantile regression model developed by Abadie,
Angrist, and Imbens (2002) to estimate the causal effect of