Recent empirical studies argue that the implementation of quality standards among agricultural exporters has the character of a fixed cost. However, this can be misleading if fixed costs are only understood in terms of required investments. Instead, we argue that standard adoption is the result...

We estimate the causal effect of food standards on Vietnamese pangasius farmers' wellbeing measured by per capita consumption expenditure. We estimate both the average effects and the local average treatment effects on poorer and richer farmers by instrumental variable quantile regression. Our...