An increase in the price of fruits and vegetables relative to less healthy foods could reduce consumers’ incentives to purchase fruits and vegetables and result in less healthy diets. Whether such a change in relative prices and incentives has occurred in the United States is difficult to...

We estimate an error correction model representing demand for leafy green vegetables but generalize the structure to allow for adjustment to one conspicuous shock. We investigate whether the adjustment rate to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 2006 warning that fresh spinach...

To better understand how information about potential health hazards influences food demand, this case study examines consumers’ responses to newspaper articles on avian influenza, informally referred to as bird flu. The focus here is on the response to bird flu information in Italy as news...

The objective of this study is to estimate how differences in diet quality, physical activity, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption and bodyweight correlate with whether or not an individual has been diagnosed with diabetes, and whether or not an individual uses medication to manage his or her...

Obesity is a sizable problem. Gaps in consumer information and the contribution of obesity to societal costs raise the possibility for government policy actions. However, any such action must be justified by benefits in excess of policy-induced costs.

This report explores the structure and function of the U.S. nutrition research system, with an emphasis on trends in Federal support. It describes how nutrition research is used, especially for nutrition education and communication, but also for regulation and food assistance. The report uses...

We examine five approaches economists and health policy analysts have developed for evaluating policy affecting health a safety: cost-of-illness, willingness-to-pay, cost-effectiveness analysis, risk-risk analysis, and health-health analysis. We examine the theoretical basis and empirical...

This paper generalizes the standard error correction model and applies this more general modeling procedure to an analysis of the spinach e-coli outbreak on consumer demand.