Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality / Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dubé, Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, and Molly Schnell.

By:

Allcott, Hunt

Contributor(s):

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w24094.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

Online resources:

Available additional physical forms:

Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers

Abstract: We study the causes of "nutritional inequality": why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with identical local supply, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the common notion that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as "food deserts," could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. By contrast, the structural results predict that means-tested subsidies for healthy food could eliminate nutritional inequality at a fiscal cost of about 15 percent of the annual budget for the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Tags from this library: No tags from this library for this title. Log in to add tags.

Average rating: 0.0 (0 votes)

Holdings
Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w24094 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

Total holds: 0

Collection: Colección NBER Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)

Previous	No cover image available	No cover image available	No cover image available	No cover image available	No cover image available	No cover image available	No cover image available	Next
Previous	nber w24091 House Price Beliefs And Mortgage Leverage Choice /	nber w24092 Valuing Government Obligations When Markets are Incomplete /	nber w24093 Did the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Help Counties Most Affected by the Great Recession? /	nber w24094 Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality /	nber w24095 Cost Sharing in Insurance Coverage for Precision Medicine /	nber w24096 Behavioral Inattention /	nber w24097 Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature /	Next

December 2017.

We study the causes of "nutritional inequality": why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with identical local supply, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only nine percent, while the remaining 91 percent is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the common notion that policies to reduce supply inequities, such as "food deserts," could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality. By contrast, the structural results predict that means-tested subsidies for healthy food could eliminate nutritional inequality at a fiscal cost of about 15 percent of the annual budget for the U.S. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.