Maxime Tranchard – Assessing the effect of sin taxes: How does design matter?
Ondine Berland – Junk Food, Leisure, and Income Inequalities
Many studies have documented that high-income households tend to adopt diets of higher nutritional quality. Guided by the fact that the ‘liking for sweet taste is both innate and universal’ (Drewnowski, 1997) and differences in supply conditions only explain a small share of diet inequalities (Allcott et al., 2019), we investigate a driver of food preferences that has not been explored yet: income enables households to substitute the pleasure derived from tasty (but unhealthy) foods with expensive leisure activities. We start by leveraging the latest wave of the French Consumer Expenditure Survey data (Budget des Familles, 2017) to describe the income gradient in demand for leisure and healthy food. We document a positive correlation between income, diet quality, and non-durable out-of-home leisure. In an effort to evidence causality, we turn to transaction data (Kantar 2019-2020) to explore the effects of 2020 COVID-19-related lockdowns that can be seen as a negative and very large shock on out-of-home leisure, affecting disproportionately rich households (who demand more leisure). This unique exogenous variation will allow for a more direct analysis of the impact of leisure consumption on diet quality.