Food prices and overweight patterns in Italy

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractIn this paper we examine the role of relative food prices in determining the recent increase in body weight in Italy. Cross-price elasticities of unhealthy and healthy foods estimated by a demand system provide a consistent framework to evaluate substitution effects, when a close association is assumed between unhealthy (healthy) foods and more (less) energy-dense foods. We used a dataset constructed from a series of cross-sections of the Italian Household Budget Survey (1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005) to obtain the variables of the demand system, which accounts for regional price variability. The relative increase of healthy food prices was found to produce nontrivial elasticities of substitution towards higher relative consumption of unhealthy foods, with effects on weight outcomes. In addition, these changes were unevenly distributed among individuals and were particularly significant for those who were poorer and had less education.

Does Cigarette Smoking Affect Body Weight? Causal Estimates from the Clean Indoor Air Law Discontinuity

“…One plausible interpretation regards 13 Note that observations above 90% percentiles are sparse. See Pieroni et al (2011). the generally poor individual health condition of obese people, who are incentivated to stop smoking rather than to reduce cigarette consumption.…”

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Do Cash Transfers Promote Food Security? The Case of the South African Child Support Grant

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“…The main shortcoming of the LP approach concerns the choice of the most appropriate bandwidth. We followCalonico et al (2014) for the best choice.13 As stressed byJacob et al (2012), more sophisticated functional forms may also be used as robustness checks of the linear formulation.14 We apply to food expenditure the procedure used byPieroni et al (2013) andPieroni and Salmasi (2015) to capture non-linear patterns in food consumption.…”

A systematic review of the effectiveness of taxes on nonalcoholic beverages and high-in-fat foods as a means to prevent obesity trends

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