Scale and Capacity Limits in Decentralized FDA Food-Safety Enforcement
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2026
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| _version_ | 1866912901945622528 |
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| author | Tchuente, Guy |
| author_facet | Tchuente, Guy |
| contents | This paper asks whether regulatory monitoring exhibits nonlinear capacity limits as the scale and complexity of the regulated environment increase. Using a county--year panel of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspections merged with local establishment counts, we identify a sharp breakpoint: beyond a threshold scale, severe inspection findings rise while inspection effort per establishment flattens or declines. The threshold and the post-break deterioration vary across food-related industry groups and shift with proxies for local density and connectedness, consistent with monitoring becoming ``too big to monitor" in more interconnected production environments rather than driven by simple reallocation or delay. Methodologically, we provide a portable breakpoint selection and piecewise-estimation framework that can be applied to other enforcement settings. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12392 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Scale and Capacity Limits in Decentralized FDA Food-Safety Enforcement Tchuente, Guy General Economics Economics This paper asks whether regulatory monitoring exhibits nonlinear capacity limits as the scale and complexity of the regulated environment increase. Using a county--year panel of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspections merged with local establishment counts, we identify a sharp breakpoint: beyond a threshold scale, severe inspection findings rise while inspection effort per establishment flattens or declines. The threshold and the post-break deterioration vary across food-related industry groups and shift with proxies for local density and connectedness, consistent with monitoring becoming ``too big to monitor" in more interconnected production environments rather than driven by simple reallocation or delay. Methodologically, we provide a portable breakpoint selection and piecewise-estimation framework that can be applied to other enforcement settings. |
| title | Scale and Capacity Limits in Decentralized FDA Food-Safety Enforcement |
| topic | General Economics Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12392 |