Download or read book Three Essays on Consumer Demand Health and Food Environment written by Zefeng Dong and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essay 1 investigates whether dietary choice links with physical activity, obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and medication usages for these two diseases. To measure consumers dietary choice, this essay employs yearly expenditure shares of six food categories, including fruits and vegetables, snacks and chips, yogurts, regular soft drinks, diet soft drinks and bottled water. The model is Ordinary Least Square models of expenditure share of one food category against physical activity, obesity or type 2 diabetes. Essay 1 finds that the physically active individuals spend more of their grocery budget on fruits and vegetables and yogurts and spend less snacks and chips, regular soft drinks and diet soft drinks on average than the physically inactive ones. The endogeneity of physical activity affects the regression results for some food categories. It also finds that the dietary pattern of obese individuals are less healthy than that of nonobese individuals. However, when considers the usage of medications for obesity and a mixed method for obesity identification (i.e. identify obesity with self-reported survey and BMI 30), the results are mixed. For the model of type 2 diabetes, the expenditure share of a food category is driven by both medication usage and nutrition facts of the food category. Essay 2 investigates the associations between consumer demand on yogurts and physical activity and obesity. I consider a mixed multinomial logit model with random coefficients for price and product attributes. Essay 2 finds that individuals who do exercise some days in a week are the most price sensitive on average, followed by the individuals who do exercise most days in a week and the ones who rarely or never exercise. Physically active individuals, on average, prefer healthy yogurts such as plain yogurts and Greek yogurts. It also finds that the individuals whose BMI 30 (i.e. obese or overweight) are more price sensitive and prefer yogurts with more sugar and protein and less total fat on average than the ones whose BMI

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Safety Health and Food Marketing written by Pei Zhou and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ensuring the safety and healthfulness of food purchases holds paramount significance for consumers, as it directly impacts not only their physical well-being but also their overall quality of life. Hence, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the factors that shape these choices becomes imperative for the promotion of public health and the prevention of diet-related diseases. This dissertation consists of three essays on food safety, health, and food marketing. It seeks to explore how consumers respond to food recalls, analyze the influence of emerging trends like online grocery shopping, product innovation, and food reformulation on the healthfulness of consumers' food purchases, and ultimately assess their impact on public health outcomes. The first essay examines the heterogeneous impact of various recall information on consumers' perceived health risks and quantifies the overall impact of food recalls on demand. Using the fresh meat market as a case study, this chapter formulates a structural random coefficient discrete choice model of consumer demand using Nielsen Retail Scanner Data from 2012 to 2016. Results show that both the number of recalls and the volume of food recalled have negative and significant effects on the demand. To minimize the negative impact of recalls, the highest priority should be given to preventing large-scale recalls, Class I recalls, product contamination recalls and recalls due to being produced without benefit of inspection or import violation. Food companies should proactively recall when problems arise. The second essay investigates the role of online grocery shopping in mediating the relationship between the food environment and the healthfulness of household food purchases, with a focus on disadvantaged groups. Using Nielsen Consumer Panel Data from 2015 to 2019, this chapter employs fixed effect models with instrument variables to address potential endogeneity associated with the local food environment and the adoption of online grocery shopping. Results suggest that online grocery services may worsen nutrition inequality linked to food environment disparities. Combining online grocery services with local in-store options can lead to improved diet quality. The third essay explores how nutrients, new ingredients, and health claims from product reformulation influence consumer decisions, dietary intake, and population health in the beverage market using a random coefficient discrete choice model and Nielsen Retail Scanner Data from 2015 to 2019. Results find that new ingredients that provide functionality have a significant positive impact on consumer choices. In addition, the use of health claims can significantly increase consumer demand for beverages. Further, the policy aimed at lowering the intake of one single nutrient may have an unintended spillover effect on other nutrient intakes, and policymakers should take a comprehensive approach and consider the broader nutrient impact of any policy aimed at reducing a specific nutrient.

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Environment Food Demand and Health written by Danhong Chen and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Assistance Environmental Stressor and Food Choices written by Jinglin Feng and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on food assistance, environmental stressor, and food choices: (i) The first essay analyzes the distributional impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on diet quality. (ii) The second essay examines heterogeneity in the use of social networks and charitable food assistance over the SNAP benefit month. (iii) Lastly, the third essay focuses on the effect of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, using household scanner data. SNAP is the nation's largest domestic food and nutrition assistance program for low-income Americans. Recent studies that examined the effect of SNAP on diet quality focus on the average effects. In essay one, we use the 2012 USDA's National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) data and an unconditional quantile estimator to examine the distributional impacts of SNAP on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2010 (HEI-2010). To identify the differential impacts of SNAP across the distribution of diet quality, we exploit exogenous variation in state's maximum weekly unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and state outreach spending per capita as instrumental variables (IVs). We find that SNAP has no significant impact on households' diet quality on average. However, for households with initially low-to-intermediate diet quality, SNAP participation reduces their HEI scores by over 17% or more than 7 points out of a total score of 100. The negative impacts of SNAP on these HEI quantiles are mainly driven by an increased acquisition of empty calories. As low-income households often combine personal resources with both public and private food assistance in times of need, understanding how they fulfill their energy needs over the SNAP benefit month is crucial. In essay two, we use the 2012 USDA's FoodAPS data to examine the strategies SNAP households use to meet their energy needs throughout the benefit month, focusing on complementary food sources like social networks and charitable food assistance (CFA). We also explore heterogeneity in the use of these food sources. Our study yields three key findings. First, we find a significant spike in calorie acquisition on benefit receipt day (day 0), rather than a SNAP cycle throughout the month. Second, both social networks and CFA play an important role in food acquisition, particularly for households not owning a vehicle, albeit homeownership and income moderate this impact. Third, diet quality does not change over the course of the benefit month. Air pollution, as the largest environmental health risk factor worldwide, has well-documented adverse effects on human health and well-being, yet its impact on consumer food choices and diet quality remains largely unknown. Essay three studies the causal effects of short-term ambient air pollution on diet quality, as measured by Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), using wildfire smoke exposure from 2010-2018 as a source of exogenous variation for air pollution. By linking nationwide satellite-based smoke plume data, ground-based pollutant measurements, and consumer scanner data for more than 120,000 U.S. households, we find no impacts of air pollution on overall diet quality or individual diet components. This suggests that air pollution levels might not be a substantial driver of household dietary choices. Our findings reveal a socioeconomic gradient in diet quality, with lower-income households, less-educated household heads, and counties with higher PM2.5 levels consistently exhibiting poorer diet quality. Moreover, we observe no evidence that the effects of air pollution vary across income, education, and county pollution levels.

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Policy and Health Consumption Patterns written by Elena Castellari and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Food Consumption and Health Related Issues written by Fuad Mohammed Alagsam and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Food Waste and Consumer Demand Analysis written by Yang Yu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unnecessary food waste is a global economic and environmental problem. In the United States alone, consumer welfare loss from food waste amounts to a massive $160 billion annually, which is about 30% of the total food supply. Moreover, discarded food is a major source of greenhouse gas emission globally, generating about 3.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide and methane each year. If regarded as a country, food waste is the third-largest carbon-emitting country after the U.S. and China. Despite the importance of the food-waste problem, researchers have had only limited success in studying the underlying issues behind food waste, partly because no public or private organization is measuring actual food waste on a wide scale. At best, researchers have been able to investigate food-waste issues either at the national level by comparing separate datasets on food consumption and food acquisition or at the small scale by conducting experiments or surveys. The three essays in this dissertation study attempts to fill this gap by (i) employing an indirect but creative method to examine household-level food waste in a national survey of food acquisition, thus allowing us to investigate how household characteristics are linked to the estimated levels of food waste, (ii) incorporating food waste into a theoretical model of household behavior, thereby showing that waste is a rational outcome of utility maximization and an important factor to account for in other models of household-level food behavior, and (iii) finding empirical evidence in consumer and market data that policy changes (i.e., extending the sell-by date on milk cartons) can and do reduce food waste. To overcome the lack of observed data on food waste, the first essay begins by formulating household food consumption as a production process that transforms food inputs into chemical energy required for the human body's metabolic process and physical activities. Household-level food waste is estimated as input inefficiency via a stochastic frontier production model. Applying the method to a nationally representative sample of households, the essay shows that on average, U.S. households waste about 31% of their food, and that this level of annual waste corresponds to $240 billion. In addition, by accommodating heterogeneous wasting behavior, the results indicate that healthier diets and higher income lead to more household food waste, whereas lower household food security, food-assistance program participation, and larger household sizes are associated with less food waste. The second essay shows that without modeling or at least partially accounting for wasting behavior, demand estimates in traditional models are potentially biased. The reason for the bias is that the omitted food waste is often a rational and heterogeneous choice made by households and linked to other consumer choices. This point is illustrated by both theoretical and empirical examples. Two structural approaches to identifying and estimating rational food waste are introduced. The first approach partially identifies the waste function through economic constraints. The second approach considers behavioral assumptions on household utility maximization. Taken together, these efforts represent one of the first attempts to incorporate food waste into utility-maximizing models of consumer behavior and provide useful estimates to study the rationales of wasting food. Policymakers could apply the models and utilize the results to calibrate the amounts of actual consumption and to find more effective mechanisms to incentivize food waste reduction. The third essay examines a real-world policy change that was intended to reduce food waste. Consumers often find sell-by labels confusing and misinterpret their meanings as "safe-until" dates. Consequently, a significant portion of perishable food is mismanaged and disposed of earlier than necessary. As an effort to reduce food waste, in September 2010, New York City's Board of Health repealed its regulation on sell-by dates of pasteurized milk products. This policy change, in effect, increased the shelf-life of milk from 9 days to about 15 days. Based on a theoretical model of rational food waste and various empirical verifications using micro-level scanner data, the essay finds that the city's new policy effectively reduced food waste by more than 10%. This result translates to a reduction in wasted milk of more than 5.2 million pounds annually in New York City, an approximately $3.4 million value. This study is the first to find empirical evidence that policy changes can reduce food waste.

Download or read book Three Essays on Differentiated Products and Heterogeneous Consumer Preferences written by Yan Heng and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consumers' food demand has been found to be affected not only by prices and income, but also by their increasing concern about factors like health benefits, animal welfare, and environmental impacts. Thus, many food producers have differentiated and advertised their products using relevant attributes. The increasing demand and supply of differentiated food products have raised questions regarding consumer preferences and producer strategies. This dissertation consists of three essays and empirically examines the egg market to shed light on related issues. The first question that this study aims to answer is whether consumers are willing to pay a premium for livestock and dairy products associated with improved animal welfare. Consumers' attitude towards such products not only affect manufacturers' production decisions, but also influence policy makers and current legislations. Using a national online survey with choice experiments, the first essay found that consumers in the study sample valued eggs produced under animal-friendly environment, suggesting incentives for producers to adopt animal welfare friendly practices. In an actual shopping trip, consumers usually need to choose from products with multiple attributes and labels. Studying how consumers with heterogeneous preferences process these information simultaneously and make decisions is important for producers to target interested consumer segments and implement more effective labeling strategies. In the second essay, a different national online survey was administered. The analysis using a latent class model categorized the sample respondents into four classes, and their preferences toward attributes and various label combinations differed across classes. Scanner data, which record actually purchased choices, are an important source of information to study consumer preferences. Diverging from the traditional demand approaches that are limited in studying differentiated product markets using scanner data, this study used a random coefficient logit model to overcome potential limitations and examine the demand relationship as well as price competition in the differentiated egg market. The third essay found that conventional and private labeled eggs yielded higher margins due to less elastic demand and cautioned producers of specialty eggs, which are usually sold at high prices despite their much more elastic demand.

Download or read book Three Essays on Environmental Economics written by Dale S. Rothman and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Food Policy Retailer Strategic Behavior and Consumer Welfare written by Giulia Tiboldo and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The impact of food policy and retailer strategic behavior on consumer welfare has been widely explored by researchers desiring to help policy makers to address the issues of unhealthy diets and excessive market power within the supply chain. This work contributes to the existing body of literature on food policy and social welfare by analyzing the impacts of three different policies that affect food purchases. In the first chapter, we evaluate the effects of different carbon taxes on food acquisitions to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the food system in the U.S. Our results show that these policies may significantly reduce the carbon footprint of food purchases (from -3% to -5%), mainly thanks to the fall in meat and animal-based products consumption. However, these policies are regressive, as poorer households are more burdened by the tax than relatively more affluent consumers. Moreover, the impact on the nutritional composition of food purchases is uncertain. So, trade-offs exist among environmental, nutritional and distributional goals. The second essay analyzes the welfare implications of private label (PLs) introduction in a differentiated market. We find that equilibrium prices would be higher if PLs were not in the market. Moreover, producer surplus would be lower, as PLs profits would only be partially distributed across the remaining brands. Finally, consumers would be worse off because of higher market prices and lower product variety. Therefore, we can argue that PLs are social welfare-enhancing. In the last chapter, we develop a framework to estimate the effects of anti-price gouging (APG) laws on prices and product availability during a natural disaster and provide an empirical illustration. A difference-in-difference approach can provide unbiased estimate of the causal impacts of interest if comparable treatment and control groups are chosen. To ensure that this condition holds, the "parallel trend" assumption for the outcome variables of interest should be tested. The results from our empirical application show that APG laws might be effective in keeping prices stable during a state of emergency without worsening supply shortages.

Download or read book Three Essays on Consumers Preferences for Fresh Organic Produce written by Yuko Onozaka and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Food and Health Economics written by Kara Renee Grant and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent and mostly interrelated studies that focus on consumer behavior in the areas of food and healthcare. In my first paper, my coauthors and I analyze consumers' willingness to pay and preferences for reduced food waste and increased shelf life in relation to refrigerated ready-to-eat meals. We find evidence to suggest that consumers are willing to pay for reduced food waste, but willingness to pay for increased shelf life depends on the group being considered. The groups can be separated into health-conscious and on-the-go shoppers where only the on-the-go shopper is willing to pay a premium for a product with an increased shelf life. My second paper elicits consumers' willingness to pay for a clean label and a novel microwave technology. The results suggest that consumers are willing to pay for a clean label and the magnitude varies by group. There are also groups who are willing to pay a premium for the novel technology, but it is not homogeneous among groups. In my third paper, my coauthor and I present a theoretical model of health care consumption in emergency departments and in outpatient settings as functions of patients' time, market price of health care, and health insurance coverage. Applying our theory to data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), we examine the relationship between health care utilization and health insurance coverage. From the interaction between the price effect and the network effect we find that an insured individual in a rural area has a lower likelihood of a checkup within the last year compared to an insured individual in an urban area.

Download or read book American Doctoral Dissertations written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 776 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Front of Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the past decade, tremendous growth has occurred in the use of nutrition symbols and rating systems designed to summarize key nutritional aspects and characteristics of food products. These symbols and the systems that underlie them have become known as front-of-package (FOP) nutrition rating systems and symbols, even though the symbols themselves can be found anywhere on the front of a food package or on a retail shelf tag. Though not regulated and inconsistent in format, content, and criteria, FOP systems and symbols have the potential to provide useful guidance to consumers as well as maximize effectiveness. As a result, Congress directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to undertake a study with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to examine and provide recommendations regarding FOP nutrition rating systems and symbols. The study was completed in two phases. Phase I focused primarily on the nutrition criteria underlying FOP systems. Phase II builds on the results of Phase I while focusing on aspects related to consumer understanding and behavior related to the development of a standardized FOP system. Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols focuses on Phase II of the study. The report addresses the potential benefits of a single, standardized front-label food guidance system regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, assesses which icons are most effective with consumer audiences, and considers the systems/icons that best promote health and how to maximize their use.

Download or read book Dissertation Abstracts International written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Communities in Action written by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Download or read book Local Food Systems Concepts Impacts and Issues written by Steve Martinez and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive overview of local food systems explores alternative definitions of local food, estimates market size and reach, describes the characteristics of local consumers and producers, and examines early indications of the economic and health impacts of local food systems. Defining ¿local¿ based on marketing arrangements, such as farmers selling directly to consumers at regional farmers¿ markets or to schools, is well recognized. Statistics suggest that local food markets account for a small, but growing, share of U.S. agricultural production. For smaller farms, direct marketing to consumers accounts for a higher percentage of their sales than for larger farms. Charts and tables.