Rising prevalence of obesity among adults and children is a major policy issue in many countries. Two widely discussed instruments to address obesity are a tax on unhealthy foods (fat tax) and a subsidy on healthy foods (thin subsidy). We compare these two policies to a sales tax on all food...

Random utility models are widely used to study consumer choice. The vast majority of applications assume utility is linear in consumption of the outside good, which imposes that total expenditure on the subset of goods of interest does not affect demand for inside goods and restricts demand...

Denmark introduced a new tax on saturated fat in food products with effect from October 2011. The objective of this paper is to make an effect assessment of this tax for some of the product categories most significantly affected by the new tax, namely fats such as butter, butter-blends,...

The extant literature on fat taxes and thin subsidies tends to focus on the overall effectiveness of such fiscal instruments in altering diets and improving health. However, little is known about the welfare impacts of fiscal food policies on society. This paper fills a gap in the literature...

Anticipating the impact of changes in economic incentives on dietary quality and nutritional health requires knowledge of how physical quantities of food consumed respond to price and income variations. A problem arises, however, because physical quantities are: 1- not consistent aggregates in...

This paper examines the health effects of a fiscal food policy based on a combinationof fat taxes and thin subsidies. The fat tax is based on the saturated fat content of fooditems while the thin subsidy is applied to select fruit and vegetbale items. The policy is designed to be revenue neutral...

The extant literature on fat taxes and thin subsidies tends to focus on the overall effectiveness of such fiscal instruments in altering diets and improving health. However, little is known about the welfare impacts of fiscal food policies on society. This paper fills a gap in the literature by...

"Sin taxes" are high on the political agenda in the global fight against obesity. According to theory, they are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control are at least as price responsive as consumers with high self-control, even in the absence of externalities. In this paper, we...

"Sin taxes" are high on the political agenda in the global fight against obesity. According to theory, they are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control are at least as price responsive as consumers with high self-control, even in the absence of externalities. In this paper, we...