THREE ESSAYS ON CONSUMER DEMAND, HEALTH AND FOOD ENVIRONMENT
Open Access
- Author:
- Dong, Zefeng
- Graduate Program:
- Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 14, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Edward C Jaenicke, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Edward C Jaenicke, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Douglas Harvey Wrenn, II, Committee Member
Peter William Newberry, Outside Member
Yizao Liu, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Edward C Jaenicke, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Consumer Demand
Food Environments
Obesity
Type 2 Diabetes
Physical Activity - Abstract:
- Essay 1 investigates whether dietary choice links with physical activity, obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and medication usages for these two diseases. To measure consumers’ dietary choice, this essay employs yearly expenditure shares of six food categories, including fruits and vegetables, snacks and chips, yogurts, regular soft drinks, diet soft drinks and bottled water. The model is Ordinary Least Square models of expenditure share of one food category against physical activity, obesity or type 2 diabetes. Essay 1 finds that the physically active individuals spend more of their grocery budget on fruits and vegetables and yogurts and spend less snacks and chips, regular soft drinks and diet soft drinks on average than the physically inactive ones. The endogeneity of physical activity affects the regression results for some food categories. It also finds that the dietary pattern of obese individuals are less healthy than that of nonobese individuals. However, when considers the usage of medications for obesity and a mixed method for obesity identification (i.e. identify obesity with self-reported survey and BMI ≥ 30), the results are mixed. For the model of type 2 diabetes, the expenditure share of a food category is driven by both medication usage and nutrition facts of the food category. Essay 2 investigates the associations between consumer demand on yogurts and physical activity and obesity. I consider a mixed multinomial logit model with random coefficients for price and product attributes. Essay 2 finds that individuals who do exercise some days in a week are the most price sensitive on average, followed by the individuals who do exercise most days in a week and the ones who rarely or never exercise. Physically active individuals, on average, prefer healthy yogurts such as plain yogurts and Greek yogurts. It also finds that the individuals whose BMI ≥ 30 (i.e. obese or overweight) are more price sensitive and prefer yogurts with more sugar and protein and less total fat on average than the ones whose BMI < 30. However, when I use self-reported obesity to identify obesity, the regression result regarding price sensitivity is contradictory to that using BMI to identify obesity. In Essay 3, we consider migration as an identification strategy to control the endogeneity of food environment. A first-difference model is employed to examine the association between the change in diet quality and the change in food environment for movers over the year. This study finds that in some years consumers’ diet quality responds to the change in food environment caused by migration, but this significant association does not consistently exist in every year. This essay demonstrates that the policy aiming to improve people’s diet by improving food environment in neighborhood likely fails.