Essays on Food Choices and Food Safety
2016-11
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Essays on Food Choices and Food Safety
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2016-11
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This dissertation concentrates on demand-side issues on food economics. Specifically, we investigate policy-relevant economic issues related to food safety and food choices in the United States. Due to the rising diet-related health issues in the U.S. population, understanding factors that impact food choices is of major importance. In the first essay we explore the impact of food shopping frequency on the healthfulness of food choices. Using household-level data, we find that a higher food shopping frequency leads to less healthful food purchases for at-home consumption. We further provide evidence that the negative effect is primarily because households purchase increasingly more temptation foods – savory and sugary processed items such as snacks and beverages – as they shop more frequently. Based on our results, we conjecture that limiting consumer exposure to temptation foods in grocery stores, and instead, increasing the visibility of fresh fruits and vegetables would lead consumers to purchasing healthier foods. The second and third essays focus on issues surrounding food safety in the United States, and the private sector’s incentive to invest in and enforce food safety standards. Specifically, we investigate consumers’ choices in the case of a recall of a branded product due to a food safety concern. If consumers switch to other products, then any losses due to one manufacturer recalling their product are externalized to all manufacturers of that product. This would provide manufacturers with incentives to cooperate in setting and enforcing food safety standards to avoid recalls and hence losses due to decreases in the demand for their product. Alternatively, if consumers switch to purchasing other brands of the recalled product, then losses are incurred only by the manufacturer that is directly affected by the recall. Manufacturers of other brands of the same product may in fact experience an increase in demand. In this scenario, manufacturers do not have strong incentives to jointly establish and enforce food safety standards. We use two alternative empirical methods to model a system of demand equations that allow measuring demand spillover effects due to a food recall: a multistage budgeting approach and a discrete choice modeling approach. Specifically, in the first approach we estimate an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) and in the second approach we estimate a logit model. The second essay reports the results of the AIDS estimation. These results indicate that all competing brands of the recalled product experience positive spillover effects, hence benefiting from the recall of their rival brand. The third essay reports the results of the logit model estimation. The results from this model suggest that while most competing brands experience positive spillover effects, at least one competing brand is negatively affected. We discuss the advantages and limitations of each of the empirical approaches, and offer implications for food safety policy, specifically focusing on private sector incentives to cooperate in food safety initiatives.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. November 2016. Major: Applied Economics. Advisors: Metin Çakır, Robert King. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 133 pages.
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Rudi, Jeta. (2016). Essays on Food Choices and Food Safety. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/201667.
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