Research Recap
The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices across the United States
Key Takeway
In event study designs, researchers find economically small (and mostly statistically insignificant) effects of store entry on healthy eating. While consumers shift their purchases toward new store entrants, these purchases are primarily substituted away from other supermarkets, suggesting that benefits of combatting “food deserts” derive primarily from reducing consumers’ travel costs.
Research has documented that low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be “food deserts”, and policy-makers have suggested that this reduced local supply of healthy foods is an important cause of nutritional inequality in disadvantaged neighborhoods. However, there is limited causal evidence on the elasticity of healthy eating with respect to local availability of healthy foods.
In this study, Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, and Jean-Pierre Dubé combine reduced-form analyses with a structural demand model to quantify the relative importance of local supply versus demand in generating nutritional inequalities.
Their dataset offers a rich window into households’ choice sets, information sets, local environments, and resulting consumption. These include Nielsen Homescan panel, Nielsen’s Retail Measurement Services, Gladson’s database on the nutrition content of products (UPC level) in households’ shopping baskets, and surveys of panelists’ nutrition knowledge as well as entry dates and locations of 1,914 new supermarkets along with annual data on retail establishments in each zip code.
In event study designs, they find economically small (and mostly statistically insignificant) effects of store entry on healthy eating. While consumers shift their purchases toward new store entrants, these purchases are primarily substituted away from other supermarkets, suggesting that benefits of combating “food deserts” derive primarily from reducing consumers’ travel costs. Further, moving to an area where other people eat more or less healthfully does not affect households’ own healthy eating patterns, at least over a several-year time horizon.
Using a structural demand model, they find that exposing low-income households to the same availability and prices experienced by high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%. The remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. Projecting these demand differences onto household covariates, the authors find that educational differences explain about 20% of the relationship between income and healthy grocery demand, while about 7% is explained by nutrition knowledge scores.
While these findings are correlational, they suggest an opportunity for future research to explore the demand-side benefits of improving health education and nutritional knowledge to reduce nutritional inequality.
Hunt Allcott is Associate Professor of Economics, New York University. Rebecca Diamond is Assistant Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Jean-Pierre Dubé is the Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
In this study, Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, and Jean-Pierre Dubé combine reduced-form analyses with a structural demand model to quantify the relative importance of local supply versus demand in generating nutritional inequalities.
Their dataset offers a rich window into households’ choice sets, information sets, local environments, and resulting consumption. These include Nielsen Homescan panel, Nielsen’s Retail Measurement Services, Gladson’s database on the nutrition content of products (UPC level) in households’ shopping baskets, and surveys of panelists’ nutrition knowledge as well as entry dates and locations of 1,914 new supermarkets along with annual data on retail establishments in each zip code.
In event study designs, they find economically small (and mostly statistically insignificant) effects of store entry on healthy eating. While consumers shift their purchases toward new store entrants, these purchases are primarily substituted away from other supermarkets, suggesting that benefits of combating “food deserts” derive primarily from reducing consumers’ travel costs. Further, moving to an area where other people eat more or less healthfully does not affect households’ own healthy eating patterns, at least over a several-year time horizon.
Using a structural demand model, they find that exposing low-income households to the same availability and prices experienced by high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9%. The remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. Projecting these demand differences onto household covariates, the authors find that educational differences explain about 20% of the relationship between income and healthy grocery demand, while about 7% is explained by nutrition knowledge scores.
While these findings are correlational, they suggest an opportunity for future research to explore the demand-side benefits of improving health education and nutritional knowledge to reduce nutritional inequality.
Hunt Allcott is Associate Professor of Economics, New York University. Rebecca Diamond is Assistant Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Jean-Pierre Dubé is the Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing, University of Chicago Booth School of Business.