We extend the existing literature on food taxes targeting obesity. First, we incorporate the implicit substitution between sugar and fat nutrients implied by a complete food demand system and by conditioning on how food taxes affect total calorie intake. Second, we propose a methodology that...

In order to reduce obesity and associated costs, policymakers are considering various policies, including taxes, to change consumers’ high-calorie consumption habits. We investigate two sweet tax policies aimed at reducing added sweetener consumption. Both a consumption tax on sweet goods and...

Facilitating healthy eating among young people, particularly among minorities who are at high risk for gaining excess weight, is at the forefront of current policy discussions and food program reviews. We investigate the effects of social interactions and relative prices on fruit and vegetable...

Consumers' preferences for meat quality attributes such as color influence their purchasing decisions. Better understanding of consumer preferences can help meat processors and others attain effective product development and marketing and inform public policy decisions on nutrition and food...

When using household-level data to examine consumer demand it is common to find that consumers purchase only a subset of the available goods, setting the demand for the remaining goods to zero. Ignoring such censoring of the dependent variables can lead to estimators with poor statistical...

The linear approximate version of the almost ideal demand system (LA-AIDS) model is estimated using data from the Lithuanian household budget survey (HBS) covering the period from July 1992 to December 1994. Price and real expenditure elasticities for 12 food groups were estimated based on the...

Incorporating dynamics such as habit formation in analysis of demand can make estimation more reliable and help to explain the “stickiness” in consumer demand behavior when consumers receive new information about products, such as a food safety event or recall. Scanner data allow many...

Incorporating dynamics such as habit formation in analysis of demand can make estimation more reliable and help to explain the “stickiness” in consumer demand behavior when consumers receive new information about products, such as a food safety event or recall. Scanner data allow many...

Paper for presentation at the Northeastern Agricultural & Resource Economics Association’s Workshop on Economics and Child Nutrition Programs, AAEA & NAREA Joint Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 23, 2011.

We study the determinants of somatic cell count (SCC) for fluid milk among U.S. dairies. We synthesize much of the work that has been done to model SCC economically in order to identify the potential impacts of buyer-imposed penalties and incentives within the supply chain. Additionally we...