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Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 134 No. 4 2019

Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality*

Hunt Allcott1; Rebecca Diamond2; Jean-Pierre Dubé3; Jessie Handbury4; Ilya Rahkovsky5; Molly Schnell6

1 New York University and National Bureau of Economic Research · 2 Stanford Graduate School of Business and National Bureau of Economic Research · 3 University of Chicago Booth School of Business and National Bureau of Economic Research · 4 Wharton and National Bureau of Economic Research · 5 U.S. Department of Agriculture · 6 Northwestern University and National Bureau of Economic Research

Abstract

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. We then estimate a structural model of grocery demand, using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains’ differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups. Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality.

DOI
10.1093/qje/qjz015
Volume
134
Issue
4
Pages
1793-1844
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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