During his visit to the University of California, Davis, Antoine Nebout-Javal presented a paper titled “Risk, Time, and Diet Quality: Evidence from a General Population Survey” at the Agricultural Economics seminar.
This paper explores the relationships between overall diet quality and attitudes toward risk and time using a general population survey. We combine a state-of-the-art food frequency questionnaire and a choice-based preference module to elicit individual risk and time preferences. The online questionnaire was administered to a socioeconomic panel representative of the French population. We show that risk and time preferences are associated with individual heterogeneity in key aspects of diet quality, a result that holds across a wide range of robustness checks. Using a hierarchical Bayes framework, we jointly estimate individual risk aversion and impatience parameters and show that associations hold for both model-free and structural estimates of risk and time preferences. We further show that these associations account for a substantial share of the heterogeneity in dietary outcomes beyond sociodemographic controls. However, despite their importance for individual heterogeneity, behavioral preferences explain little of the observed socioeconomic gradients in diet quality.