Among affluent countries, those with market-liberal welfare regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity. The impact of cheap, accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation. An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to...

A greater proportion of the United States (US) population is overweight or obese (with BMI over 25kg/m2) relative to all Western European populations, and it might be expected that migrants to either the US or Western Europe would develop patterns of overweight and obesity that reflect this...

Socioeconomic inequalities in diet-related health outcomes are well-recognised, but are not fully explained by observational studies of consumption. We provide a novel analysis to identify purchasing patterns more precisely, based on data for take-home food and beverage purchases from 25,674...

In-store product placement is perceived to be a factor underpinning impulsive food purchasing but empirical evidence is limited. In this study we present the first in-depth estimate of the effect of end-of-aisle display on sales, focussing on alcohol. Data on store layout and product-level sales...

Public acceptability influences policy action, but the most acceptable policies are not always the most effective. This discrete choice experiment provides a novel investigation of the acceptability of different interventions to reduce alcohol consumption and the effect of information on...

"Relying on markets alone would make for a poor, dishonest, and miserable society. Banks lend for the short term, and business has to make a profit in less time than that. It succeeds brilliantly when product life is shorter than credit maturities, in retail, consumer durables, services, and...

Markets are taken as the norm in economics and in much of political and media discourse. But if markets are superior why does the public sector remain so large? Avner Offer provides a distinctive new account of the effective temporal limits on private, public, and social activity. Understanding...