摘要：Meatpacking consolidated rapidly in the last two decades: slaughter plants became muchlarger, and concentration increased as smaller firms left the industry. We use establish-ment-based data from the U.S. Census Bureau to describe consolidation and to identifythe roles of scale economies and technological change in driving consolidation. Throughthe 1970's, larger plants paid higher wages, generating a pecuniary scale diseconomythat largely offset the cost advantages that technological scale economies offered largeplants. The larger plants' wage premium disappeared in the 1980's, and technologicalchange created larger and more extensive technological scale economies. As a result,large plants realized growing cost advantages over smaller plants, and production shiftedto larger plants.
