NUI Galway Health Economics Seminar: Incentivizing Nutritious Diets
Video
Description
Incentivizing Nutritious Diets: A Field Experiment of Relative Price Changes and How They are Framed.
This paper examines how consumers respond to price incentives for nutritious relative to less-nutritious foods, and whether the framing of the price incentive as a subsidy for nutritious food or a tax on non-nutritious food influences consumers’ responses.
Analyzing transaction data from an 8-month randomized controlled field experiment involving 208 households, we find that a 10% relative price difference between nutritious and less nutritious food does not significantly affect overall purchases, although low-income households respond to the subsidy frame by buying more of both nutritious and less-nutritious food.
Bio: John Cawley is a Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management, and the Department of Economics, at Cornell University. His research focuses on the economics of risky
health behaviours; in particular, those that relate to obesity.
John, an Honorary Professor at the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics, is visiting NUI Galway on a Fulbright Scholarship during which he will be working with faculty and researchers on various research projects and curriculum development. He will also contribute to the Masterclass in Health Economics and Policy that will take place here between March 21 and 24.
John serves as an Editor of the Journal of Health Economics, an Associate Editor of Health Economics, and is on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Health Economics and Economics & Human Biology. He has served on advisory boards and expert panels for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and other government agencies in the United States. He has received several prestigious awards for his research on obesity.
He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University.