Working Papers
The Demand for Soft Drinks: Evidence from Purchases At-Home and Away-From-Home with Linqi Zhang, 2022 New!
Using a novel dataset, we study household demand for soft drinks, especially sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) for a representative sample of U.S. households. The data cover all channels of soft drink purchases, including at-home, on-the-go, and in restaurants. We nonparametrically estimate a random coefficient nested logit model and account for preference heterogeneity across SNAP participants, nonparticipant poor, higher income households, households with children, and high sugar consuming households. By simulating its impacts, we find that a soda tax is effective in reducing SSB demand at-home. That is not the case away-from-home because households overall are less price sensitive away-from-home. The soda tax will be regressive, even accounting for the away-from-home segment. SNAP participants and high sugar consuming households have smaller reductions in SSB demand in percentage terms even though the total reductions in volume is large. The impact is similar for households with or without children.
Food Demand and Cash Transfers: A Collective Household Approach with Homescan Data, 2023, accepted at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
I study how individual preferences and bargaining power within older couples affects the impact of cash transfers on food demand. Using longitudinal Homescan data, I find that wives have stronger preferences for food than husbands, and that household demand patterns for food are affected by spouse’s relative bargaining power. Failure to account for these effects leads to underestimates of older couples' total food demand, and of their implied response (at both intensive and extensive margins) to a counterfactual experiment of a cash transfer program with equivalent benefit size as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I find that the cash transfer can achieve the goals of SNAP to some extent.
Publications
Identification of Semiparametric Model Coefficients, With an Application to Collective Households with Arthur Lewbel, 2022 Journal of Econometrics.
We prove identification of coefficients for a set of semiparametric specifications that are related to multiple index models. Potential applications of these results include models of observed heterogeneity in production functions and in consumer demand systems. We then generalize these results to identify a class of collective household consumption models. We extend the existing literature by proving point identification, rather than the weaker generic identification, of all the features of the collective household model, including price effects. We estimate the model using Japanese consumption data, and find substantial variation in resource shares and indifference scales across households of different sizes.
The Demand for Soft Drinks: Evidence from Purchases At-Home and Away-From-Home with Linqi Zhang, 2022 New!
Using a novel dataset, we study household demand for soft drinks, especially sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB) for a representative sample of U.S. households. The data cover all channels of soft drink purchases, including at-home, on-the-go, and in restaurants. We nonparametrically estimate a random coefficient nested logit model and account for preference heterogeneity across SNAP participants, nonparticipant poor, higher income households, households with children, and high sugar consuming households. By simulating its impacts, we find that a soda tax is effective in reducing SSB demand at-home. That is not the case away-from-home because households overall are less price sensitive away-from-home. The soda tax will be regressive, even accounting for the away-from-home segment. SNAP participants and high sugar consuming households have smaller reductions in SSB demand in percentage terms even though the total reductions in volume is large. The impact is similar for households with or without children.
Food Demand and Cash Transfers: A Collective Household Approach with Homescan Data, 2023, accepted at Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.
I study how individual preferences and bargaining power within older couples affects the impact of cash transfers on food demand. Using longitudinal Homescan data, I find that wives have stronger preferences for food than husbands, and that household demand patterns for food are affected by spouse’s relative bargaining power. Failure to account for these effects leads to underestimates of older couples' total food demand, and of their implied response (at both intensive and extensive margins) to a counterfactual experiment of a cash transfer program with equivalent benefit size as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I find that the cash transfer can achieve the goals of SNAP to some extent.
Publications
Identification of Semiparametric Model Coefficients, With an Application to Collective Households with Arthur Lewbel, 2022 Journal of Econometrics.
We prove identification of coefficients for a set of semiparametric specifications that are related to multiple index models. Potential applications of these results include models of observed heterogeneity in production functions and in consumer demand systems. We then generalize these results to identify a class of collective household consumption models. We extend the existing literature by proving point identification, rather than the weaker generic identification, of all the features of the collective household model, including price effects. We estimate the model using Japanese consumption data, and find substantial variation in resource shares and indifference scales across households of different sizes.
