Three essays on food economics
Date
2022
Authors
Mendis-Murukkuwadura, Sachintha Sarani, author
Bonanno, Alessandro, advisor
Berning, Joshua, committee member
Bayham, Jude, committee member
Cleary, Rebecca, committee member
Miller, Ray, committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
This dissertation is comprised of three analyses of households' food acquisition behavior. In Chapter 2, we estimate the substitution between different food categories and time allocated to food purchase and preparation using a demand system which includes both the demand for time and that for goods, by extending the Exact Affine Stone Index-EASI (Lewbel & Pendakur, 2009). This is the first study estimating Resource Engel Curves (which characterize the relationship between "total resources" and resource share), and goods-time cross price elasticities. For this analysis we created a unique dataset by merging the 2012 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) with the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS), and perform the analysis for three sub-samples of households - 1) households participating in the SNAP program, 2) SNAP-eligible households that do not participate in the program, and 3) SNAP-ineligible households. The objective of Chapter 3 is to study the relationship between time allocated to different food related activities and households' diet quality of food acquisitions measured by their Healthy Eating Index - HEI, across the distribution of HEI. We utilize the same datasets developed in Chapter 2 and an Unconditional Quantile Regression estimator to perform the analysis on the same three sub-samples of households used in Chapter 2. In Chapter 4, we assess whether households whose children are exposed to Farm-to-School Programming show different fruits and vegetables purchasing patterns than those that are not. We matched two years of the USDA Farm to School Census (2013 and 2015) to Information Resource Incorporated Consumer Network Panel household-level data on Food-At-Home fruits and vegetables expenditures. We perform our analysis focusing on sub-samples of households residing in metro and non-metro areas, as well as by households below and above 185 percent of the poverty line.