Healthy and unhealthy food consumption - microeconometric methods

Cand. polit. Aslak Hedemann Hansen

defended his PhD thesis 12 August 2011:

Microeconometric Methods Applied in Relation to Food Consumption, Health and Obesity Prevention

 

Summary

The objective of the thesis is to study the heterogeneity in healthy and unhealthy food consumption with a three-fold aim of 1) applying new methodology to identify and mitigate problems in policy evaluations; 2) address improved targeting of high-risk groups, and 3) add with (improved) empirical evidence on food consumption behavior, including its relation to inequality in health.

 

• Paper #1 provides an extensive survey of existing knowledge regarding obesity causation, policy solutions and evaluation of policies.
• Paper #2 focuses on a data problem in the consumer survey which forms the empirical basis for the thesis. The paper shows that an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is an improved solution to the problem.
• Paper #3 is concerned with estimation of multi-dimensional discrete stochastic variables. The convergence properties of least square cross-validation are problematic in cases including uniformly distributed variables, as biases occur in the smoothing parameters, which do not vanish asymptotically. The paper develops an extended approach, which asymptotically overcomes these bias problems.
• Paper #4 examines the effects of a tax on saturated fat (SFA). The simulations reveal that a tax on SFA is expected to have better properties than a value added tax in terms of improving food consumption behavior. It adds to existing practice and knowledge by assuming - and indeed showing - that a considerable heterogeneity exists in the distribution of behavioral parameters across the survey / population.
• Paper #5 addresses the increased inequality in consumption of fruit and vegetables during the period 1999 to 2004. Specifically, the campaigns seem to have stimulated those who already had a high consumption, but left the non- or low amount consumers behind, due to a negative relationship between price and quantity.
• Paper #6 studies whether there are non-linearities in demand response due to positive and negative price changes. Empirically the paper analyses demand functions for milk and the results suggest strong asymmetries and non-linearities in such functions, depending on the type of milk.

Principal Supervisor

Senior Researcher Jørgen Dejgård Jensen, Institute of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee

Associate Professor Jonas Nordström, Institute of Food and Resource Economics, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen (chairman)

Professor Kyrre Rickertsen, Department of Economics and Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Norway

Professor Jørgen Lauridsen, Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark