Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality*
By Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dubé, Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2019
340 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. We then estimate a structural model of grocery demand, using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains’ differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups. Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f0a4ee1d20073a05a97200ffb30b6a7836ded62
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
- Matthew Gentzkow
- Stefano DellaVigna
- Stephan Seiler
- Jessie Handbury
- Hunt Allcott
- Dmitry Taubinsky
- C. Defeuilley
- Raj Chetty
In General Health Professions
In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Citations in the corpus
- Uniform Pricing in U.S. Retail Chains* (2019, background): “Allcott et al. (2018b) and Allcott et al. (2018a) are examples of papers that have already built on this strategy.”
- The Impact of Soda Taxes: Pass-Through, Tax Avoidance, and Nutritional Effects (2020, positive): “In a related article that explores the causes of nutritional inequality, Allcott et al. (2019) analyze data from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey and find that urban households in the bottom income quartile tend to travel shorter distances for shopping trips than urban households in other i”