@article{fb74292d453d4df6a52402514043e7eb,
title = "Food deserts and the causes of nutritional inequality",
abstract = "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.",
author = "Hunt Allcott and Rebecca Diamond and Dub{\'e}, {Jean Pierre} and Jessie Handbury and Ilya Rahkovsky and Molly Schnell",
note = "Funding Information: HUNT ALLCOTT REBECCA DIAMOND JEAN-PIERRE DUB{\'E} JESSIE HANDBURY ILYA RAHKOVSKY MOLLY SCHNELL 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{\textquoteright} differing presence across geographic markets ∗We thank Prottoy Aman Akbar, Yue Cao, Hae Nim Lee, and Catherine Wright for exceptional research assistance; Charles Courtemanche, Sungho Park, and Andrea Carlson for sharing data; and Marianne Bitler, Anne Case, David Cuberes, Amanda Chuan, Janet Currie, Jan De Loecker, Gilles Duranton, Joe Gy-ourko, Jakub Kastl, Ephraim Liebtag, Ilyana Kuziemko, Todd Sinai, Diane Whit-more Schanzenbach, Jesse Shapiro, Tom Vogl, and David Weinstein for helpful comments. We thank seminar participants at Amazon, the 2015 and 2017 ASSA Meetings, the Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago, Brown, Columbia, Duke, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft Research, the 2015 and 2016 NBER Summer Institutes, New York University, the Paris School of Economics, Penn State, Princeton, the Pritzker School of Medicine, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Stanford, Temple, Toronto, the Tilburg Christmas Research Camp, University of New South Wales, University of North Carolina, University of Pennsylvania, USC Marshall, the USDA, the University of Sydney, the 2014 Urban Economics Association Meeting, Warwick, Wharton, and Yale SOM. We are grateful for funding from the Chicago Booth Initiative on Global Markets, the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, the Research Sponsors{\textquoteright} Program of the Wharton Zell-Lurie Real Estate Center, and the USDA Economic Research Service. This article reflects the researchers{\textquoteright} own analyses calculated based in part on data from the Nielsen Company (US), LLC, and marketing databases provided through the Nielsen Datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing Data Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The conclusions drawn from the Nielsen data are those of the researchers and do not reflect the views of Nielsen. Nielsen is not responsible for, had no role in, and was not involved in analyzing and preparing the results reported herein. The findings and conclusions in this publication have not been formally disseminated by the USDA and should not be construed to represent any agency determination or policy. This article subsumes and replaces our previous work, Handbury, Rahkovsky, and Schnell (2015) and Allcott, Diamond, and Dub{\'e} (2017). Funding Information: Our nutrition facts are from the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies and the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service 2016, 2018). We match these nutrition facts to UPCs using crosswalks developed by the USDA (Carlson et al. 2019). The UPC-level USDA nutrition facts closely match those from a marketing data provider that we used in a previous version of this article. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Author(s) 2019.",
year = "2019",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1093/qje/qjz015",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "134",
pages = "1793--1844",
journal = "Quarterly Journal of Economics",
issn = "0033-5533",
publisher = "Oxford University Press",
number = "4",
}