This dissertation studies how firms respond to health, safety, and environmental regulations, and how those responses reshape competitive dynamics, labor conditions, and distributional outcomes. Using case studies focused on poultry slaughter line speed and decarbonization policy, I analyze how regulation functions not only as a technical constraint but as a site of contestation over who bears the costs and benefits of shifting production practices. The first chapter uses synthetic control methodology to estimate the effects of three federal regulatory changes that increased maximum slaughter line speeds in poultry plants from 1990 to 2020. Drawing on firm-level financial data, I estimate how these changes affected profits, profit rates, and profit margins for five poultry firms. I find that deregulation did not consistently improve short-run profitability and, in one case, reduced it. The results, combined with information from firm annual reports, suggest that higher line speeds led to overproduction, falling prices, and decreased firm profitability. This challenges the dominant industry narrative that line speed limits act as a bottleneck to firm performance. The second chapter continues the analysis of line speed regulation and turns to its implications for labor. I argue that labor productivity can serve as a proxy both for rising physical demands on labor and an indicator of firm-level cost advantages. I construct a novel dataset linking the same regulatory events to changes in output per worker for the same five companies. The findings show that productivity gains were concentrated in specific firms and periods, reflecting variation in how companies respond to regulatory changes. The chapter highlights how line speed regulation makes the poultry industry an important case for studying the political economy of workplace risk. The third chapter (co-authored with Michael Ash and Jim Boyce) analyzes the distributional effects of decarbonization in the U.S. electricity sector. We model three climate policy objectives – carbon reduction alone, carbon plus air quality, and carbon plus equity – and find that a carbon-only approach can increase local air pollution and worsen exposure disparities. Adding air quality and equity goals reduces both overall exposure and exposure gaps at relatively low cost.