Working Papers
The Demand for Soft Drinks: Evidence from Purchases At-Home and Away-From-Home with Linqi Zhang, revised June 2023
Using a novel dataset that includes at-home and away-from-home food purchases, we study who is affected by soda taxes. We nonparametrically estimate a random coefficient nested logit model to exploit the rich heterogeneity in preferences and price elasticities across households, including SNAP participants and non-SNAP-participant poor. By simulating its impacts, we find that soda taxes are less effective away-from-home while more effective at-home, especially by targeting the total sugar intake of the poor, those with high total dietary sugar, and households without children. Our results suggest that ignoring either segment can lead to biased policy implications.
Publications
Food Demand and Cash Transfers: A Collective Household Approach with Homescan Data, 2023 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.
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, revised June 2023
Using a novel dataset that includes at-home and away-from-home food purchases, we study who is affected by soda taxes. We nonparametrically estimate a random coefficient nested logit model to exploit the rich heterogeneity in preferences and price elasticities across households, including SNAP participants and non-SNAP-participant poor. By simulating its impacts, we find that soda taxes are less effective away-from-home while more effective at-home, especially by targeting the total sugar intake of the poor, those with high total dietary sugar, and households without children. Our results suggest that ignoring either segment can lead to biased policy implications.
Publications
Food Demand and Cash Transfers: A Collective Household Approach with Homescan Data, 2023 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.
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.
