This is an invited chapter for the forthcoming Volume 4 of the Handbook of Industrial Organization. We present empirical models of demand and supply in differentiated products industries with an emphasis on the key ideas arising from the recent applied literature. We start with a discussion of...

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choices--there is almost no change in purchases of...

Growing consumption of increasingly less expensive food, and especially "fast food", has been cited as a potential cause of increasing rate of obesity in the United States over the past several decades. Because the real minimum wage in the United States has declined by as much as half over...

This study examines the relationship between child weight and fast food and fruit and vegetable prices and the availability of fast food restaurants, full-service restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores. We estimate cross-sectional and individual-level fixed effects (FE)...

We utilize clinical records of successive visits by children to pediatric clinics in Indianapolis to estimate the effects on their body mass of environmental changes near their homes. We compare results for fixed-residence children with those for cross-sectional data. Our environmental factors...

We investigate the health consequences of changes in the supply of fast food using the exact geographical location of fast food restaurants. Specifically, we ask how the supply of fast food affects the obesity rates of 3 million school children and the weight gain of over 3 million pregnant...

Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal...

The real exchange rate (RER) has been called the single most important price, yet its behavior exhibits several puzzles. In this project, we use Big Mac prices as a unique prism to study the movement of real exchange rates. Part of our innovation is to match these prices to the prices of...

After highly publicized lawsuits against McDonald's in 2002, 26 states adopted Commonsense Consumption Acts (CCAs) - aka 'Cheeseburger Bills' - that greatly limit fast food companies' liability for weight-related harms. We provide the first evidence of the effects of CCAs using plausibly...