a microeconometric analysis of consumer taste determination and taste change for beef a new method for modeling determination of consumer taste and a test of the taste change hypothesis is presented taste varies across households because of differences in household characteristics the method has a multiple indicator and multiple cause model interpretation with taste as an unobserved variable taste indicators are residuals of regular household demand functions the factors unexplained by prices and household expenditures taste cause variables are household characteristics and other variables the proposed model is applied to u s beef demand using household data results show that structural taste changes unexplained by changes in demographic composition decreased 8 from 1977 to 1987

analyzing nutritional impacts of policies an empirical study for malawi summary widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate strategies presupposing good knowledge about nutritional impacts of policies little previous work has been carried out in this direction especially with respect to micronutrients we use representative household data from malawi and develop a demand systems approach to estimate income and price elasticities of food demand and nutrient consumption these estimates are applied for policy simulations given multiple nutritional deficiencies income related policies are better suited than price policies to improve nutrition while consumer price subsidies for maize improve calorie and mineral consumption they can worsen vitamin consumption in urban areas

the dynamics of individuals fat consumption consumers are increasingly aware of the link between their lifestyle choices and the risk of noncommunicable diseases a dynamic approach incorporating this linkage in food demand is developed where consumers maximize utility over time by choosing fat intake to control their cumulative fat level the resulting dynamic indirect utility function and household data on meat fish and dairy consumption are used to estimate a censored demand system results show that consumers consciously adjust but not instantaneously their cumulative fat level highly educated households have a faster rate of adjustment of cumulative fat when cumulative fat level increases consumers shift to dairy or white meat from red meat products

the rise of obesity in transition theory and empirical evidence from russia this paper integrates theoretical and empirical models to study the rise of human obesity in russia during the transition from a planned to a market economy to test our hypotheses we use recent individual level data from the russian longitudinal monitoring survey for 1995 and 2004 capturing representative periods of early and late transition estimation results strongly support our model of production and supply of bmi body mass index and weight the analysis indicates strong links between dietary patterns individual characteristics environmental factors and obesity in russia understanding these relationships is important for designing effective public policies aiming to improve overall nutritional wellbeing and reduce obesity and mortality of the russian population interventions which enhance education and awareness of healthy lifestyles and healthy diet could play a vital role in preventing obesity in russia

a re examination of the relationship between industry structure and economic performance the objective of this study is to develop a simultaneous equations model of profitability concentration advertising expenditures and research and development outlays the data used in the estimation are subjected to regression diagnostics in an effort to determine the importance to the estimation results of a subset of the data that can have a disproportionate influence the estimation results especially for the advertising expenditures relationship and the research and development outlays equation do change when a truncated data sample based on the omission of the outliers is used this serves partly to explain why there is some disagreement in the literature on market structure and economic performance with regard to the impact of several economic factors

quasi and simulated likelihood approaches to censored demand systems food consumption by food stamp recipients in the united states a quasi maximum likelihood estimator is proposed and applied to a censored translog demand system for foods using a sample of food stamp recipients in the united states the procedure produces remarkably close parameter and elasticity estimates to those of the simulated maximum likelihood procedure a two step procedure is also considered but it produces different elasticities demands are found to be price elastic for pork and fish but price inelastic for all other food products gross complementarity and net substitutability are obvious but these cross price effects are much less pronounced than own price and total food expenditure effects copyright 2003 oxford university press

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

zero expenditures and the estimation of engel curves over the brief interview periods typical of budget surveys such as the u k family expenditure survey households recorded expenditures are liable to be misleading indicators of their underlying consumption most starkly a household may not be observed to purchase commodities that it nevertheless consumes this paper considers the implications of such measurement errors for the estimation of demand systems and derives a consistent estimator for the special case of linear engel curves

the us retail demand for fish products an application of the almost ideal demand system the main objective is to address the limitations of past us fish demand research through the development of a variation of the almost ideal demand system model for disaggregate fish products at the retail level price and expenditure elasticities as well as elasticities of substitution between fish products and other protein commodities determined from this work may be used in the context of fisheries management and market development and promotion results indicate that with the exception of shellfish demand for the various fish products is relatively inelastic cross price elasticities are generally moderate while expenditure elasticities are large and positive for fresh fish and shellfish demographic effects especially geographical division season race occupation age sex household composition and price income interaction as a proxy for quality are highly significant variables

a simultaneous equation analysis of advertising concentration and profitability nearly two decades of econometric research have been completed in testing relationships between industrial market structure and performance recently a number of authors have reexamined these studies and cautioned on a number of conceptual difficulties which subject the results and interpretation of previous empirical work to question one primary criticism of previous research has been the failure to account for the simultaneous nature of the interrelation among elements of industry structure conduct and performance 2 4 5 11 22 25 30 while the determinants of variables such as profits advertising and concentration have been examined separately within the context of single equation models the underlying theory suggests that these variables are more properly considered as jointly determined within a system of simultaneous equations estimation of single equation models when a simultaneous system is appropriate leads to parameter estimates that are both biased and inconsistent previous empirical studies of the structure performance relationship have also suffered due to the omission of certain critical variables first the role of international trade as an element of market structure has yet to be generally incorporated into empirical studies in spite of recent theoretical work that has demonstrated its potential importance 3 20 21 second interindustry differentials in the price elasticity of demand have been neglected even though theoretical analysis clearly underscores the necessity of explicity accounting for

estimating fishing and hunting leisure spending shares in the united states abstract we apply a bivariate censored demand system to estimate hunting and fishing trip related spending shares in the united states using data from off site surveys the approach considers fishing and hunting destination decisions and includes respondents who were inactive i e did not hunt or fished in a particular season the statistical significance of correlation coefficient parameter supports the use of a joint e g bivariate rather than separate e g univariate decision modeling process for fishing or hunting share equations most individual characteristics are statistically significant as explanatory variables respondents holding recreation licenses tended to spend significantly more on recreation than those without licenses all own price and cross price elasticities are statistically significant and suggest that hunting and fishing are complements the results also suggest that the popularity of hunting may decline as the population ages

measuring advertising intensity and intangible capital in the greek food industry the objective of the present paper is to examine market conduct and its determinants in the greek food industry and to measure how and to what degree the industry and the firm s structural characteristics affect advertising intensity an advertising intensity model giving emphasis to intangible capital is formulated data from icap have been used on a four digit classification for the food industry during the 1990 1997 period the empirical results indicate that intangible capital positively affects the advertising intensity of the firm and plays an important role in strategies that affect total cost demand and structure of the market

search and consumer theory a consumer faces list prices for commodities but can buy one at a discount discounts vary randomly between sellers the number of quotations sought depends on list prices search costs and wealth this function is homogeneous of degree zero and provided some sufficient conditions are satisfied is increasing in wealth decreasing in search cost independent of the list price of the discounted commodity if indirect utility is multiplicatively separable increasing in the list price if the commodity is a necessity increasing in the list price of substitutes slutsky s equation is generalized to include search

estimating consumption from expenditure data abstract most studies of distributional issues have focused on the distribution of income but the income information usually available suffers from well known deficiencies this paper explores an alternative approach to distributional analysis based instead on expenditure data in many countries including the united kingdom available household budget data provides information on expenditures only over a short period the problems that consequently arise in interpreting data of this sort are emphasised a general specification for the stochastic structure of expenditure data is presented and a procedure for estimating participant households underlying consumption from their observed expenditures developed and discussed

a microeconometric model analysis of us consumer demand for alcoholic beverages this paper discusses the specification and estimation of a two stage budgeting consumer demand for alcoholic beverages using 1987 88 usda individual and household food consumption survey data the upper level first stage budgeting decision is modelled via a gamma tobit model the lower level second stage budgeting allocates alcohol expenditure via a synthetic demand system for beer spirits and wine the synthetic system is constructed via a normalized linear combination of the level rotterdam cbs and an aids equivalent model data on individual three day alcohol consumption from the individual food intake survey are used for analysis while price and household characteristics information are obtained from the house hold food intake survey the results show that some individual and household characteristic variables as well as economic variables have significant impacts on consumer demand for alcoholic beverages

demand systems estimation with microdata a censored regression approach demand systems estimation increasingly makes use of household level microdata mainly to measure the effects of demographic variables data based on these household expenditure surveys present a major estimation problem for any given household many of the goods have zero consumption implying a censored dependent variable techniques which do not take this censored dependent variable into account will yield biased results we utilize a censored regression approach that is computationally simple consistent and asymptotically efficient the results are then presented and compared with those obtained using an uncensored technique

disjoint search for the prices of two goods consumed jointly the extensive literature on searching for price information deals almost exclusively with the search for the price of a single good casual empiricism shows that consumers buy more than one good and search for the price of more than one good before any single purchase more importantly not all of these goods are sold at the same store search theory should therefore consider the problem of multiple search in order to determine the robustness of conclusions based on a theory developed from the problem of search for the price of a single good this paper reveals a number of insights that emerge when decisions taken in other markets are made explicit consider the situation facing the builder and designer of a new house among other things the builder must decide on the amount of insulation and the method of heating before construction starts the decision depends on the prices offered hence the builder will search for an acceptable offer when prices are not known with certainty if a low price for heat is found then little insulation is needed because the cost of lost heat is relatively low when relatively little insulation is needed the potential savings from a lower price of insulation are also small therefore the builder may be willing to accept a relatively high price for insulation in the event of costly search and having already found a low price for heat more generally the price that would be accepted in one market depends on what has been found in the other market the influence of one market on another is not clear consider another example when a low price for heating is known the cost in terms of lost heat of windows may be low thus the builder can install more windows at a lower opportunity cost

functional forms and habit effects in the us demand for coffee coffee remains the leading hot beverage consumed in the united states the present study specifies for estimation an unrestrictive box cox demand model 1957 87 data and its nested forms to provide more recent estimates and assess potential functional misspecification in past studies fitting a priori restrictive models incorporates the health trend effects of sugar and orange juice and tests the compatibility of coffee demand data with the habit formation hypothesis and assesses implications of demand elasticity estimates for projected producer revenues and demand for imported coffee maximum likelihood estimates of the box cox model automatically satisfy theoretical demand properties support strongly incorporating habits and related beverage and sugar prices in coffee demand model predict inelastic us coffee consumption to reduce per capita 24 and increase producer revenues 6 3 in 2000

fast food consumption and the ban on advertising targeting children the quebec experience abstract amid growing concerns about childhood obesity and the associated health risks several countries are considering banning fast food advertising targeting children in this article the authors study the effect of such a ban in the canadian province of quebec using household expenditure survey data from 1984 to 1992 authors examine whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban than in those that are not the authors use a triple difference indifference methodology by appropriately defining treatment and control groups and find that the ban s effectiveness is not a result of the decrease in fast food expenditures per week but rather of the decrease in purchase propensity by 13 per week overall the authors estimate that the ban reduced fast food consumption by us 88 million per year the study suggests that advertising bans can be effective provided media markets do not overlap

substitution between goods and leisure in a developing country the paper explores the substitutability between goods female leisure and male leisure we find that goods and leisure are not separable we then adapt the almost ideal demand system aids to include leisure in the system in the same manner as commodities the model is not sensitive to variations in the assumption of total time available for each individual s work and leisure results from sri lanka indicate the marginal propensity to consume leisure is quite high especially in rural areas this finding has important implications for transfer programs designed to raise food consumption a somewhat surprising complementarity between male and female leisure was also observed a number of goods were found to be complements to both male and female leisure

a latent variable model of consumer taste determination and taste change for complex carbohydrates despite evidence that aggregate consumption of complex carbohydrates has risen over the last decade food consumption surveys suggest that fewer households are consuming less bread pasta rice potatoes and corn this paper estimates systems of complex carbohydrae demand using cross sectional data from 1977 78 and 1987 88 in order to explain this paradox changes in demand that are not explained by changes in prices or income are explained by variations in taste because tastes cannot be directly observed the paper uses a multiple indicator and multiple cause mimic model to construct a suitable proxy variable in the mimic approach the indicators are residuals from a household demand function that includes prices and incomes as explanatory variables while household and demograhic proxies are cause variables the objectives in applying the mimic model are to determine the effect of consumer tastes on complex carbohydrate demand and comparing cross sectional survey data from two different periods

on bias correction in the multivariate sample selection model heien and wessells two step estimator for the multivariate sample selection model has been used extensively during the past 15 years a modified version of it with slightly different selectivity regressors has also appeared in the empirical literature both estimators are unfounded and generally do not correct for the sample selectivity bias as intended but have continued to gain popularity in empirical applications the properties of the modified heien wessells procedure are investigated in both the bivariate and multivariate contexts and the conditions under which this estimator fails to correct for sample selectivity are examined the theoretical properties are demonstrated with a simulated random sample

distributional effects of maize price increases in malawi abstractin the wake of highly volatile world prices of staple commodities we examine the impacts of increases in maize prices on various categories of households in malawi using household level data changes in household income are calculated taking into account the net maize production status of the household and food price elasticities estimated from a censored demand system while maize price increases have unequivocal deleterious effects on the incomes of urban households rural households experience differential impacts net producing households in rural areas benefit from price increases with households above the poverty line obtaining proportionally higher incomes

multi commodity consumer search abstract this paper analyses the optimal search strategy for consumers who wish to purchase several different commodities possibly from several different firms but are not perfectly informed about the prices charged by each firm for every commodity it is shown that in general the optimal search strategy will not possess the reservation property the multi commodity equivalent of a reservation price necessary and sufficient conditions are identified for the optimal search strategy to possess the reservation property and it is shown that a critical sufficient condition is that the indirect utility function is submodular comparative static results are also presented journal of economic literature classification numbers d11 d81 d83

disaggregated household meat demand with censored data previous research on meat demand has generally used highly aggregated data across time products and consumers however meat products across species are likely stronger substitutes than some products from the same species further demand for specific meat products would be expected to respond differently to market information about food safety or other events this study uses monthly consumer panel data collected between 1992 and 2000 to estimate a disaggregated meat product demand system the use of the expectations maximization algorithm is introduced to estimate a demand system that adjusts for the econometric problem of censored data resulting from purchased shares of some products by individuals often being equal to zero results indicate that certain individual meat products have noticeably different own price elasticities than existing aggregate meat product estimates of their respective species some individual meat products have stronger substitutes across species than within species e g be

consumer promotion and purchase timing the case of cheese the dynamics of cheese purchases is analysed by estimating a series of econometric models of duration based on a 170 week household panel besides purchase quantity and price data information with respect to coupon use and household demographic characteristics are used in a variety of models which build upon each other in terms of assumed distribution of interpurchase time effect of previous purchases role of demographic characteristics and effect of unobserved interpurchase time heterogeneity likelihoodratio tests clearly reject the null hypothesis that coupon use has no impact on cheese purchase timing

on price indices in the almost ideal demand system a number of papers have discussed the relationship between the almost ideal demand system aids and its linear approximation la aids in this paper it is shown that if the prices in the system are normalized to one the aids and la aids representations are identical at the point of normalization also at the point of normalization the expressions for price and expenditure elasticities from both systems are identical

food demand in mexico an application of the amemiya tobin approach to the estimation of a censored food system the modeling of micro level food demand patterns requires not only allowing for household heterogeneity but also addressing the problem of censoring in this article we present a variation of the amemiya tobin framework for estimating a censored demand system that allows for household heterogeneity the unique aspect of our approach is the use of a procedure that ensures the adding up of both latent and observed expenditure shares and also imposes expenditure share nonnegativity this system is applied to an analysis of food demand based on a random sample of urban mexican households

sample selectivity models for away from home expenditures on wine and beer the impact of household characteristics on away from home wine and beer weekly expenditures in the usa is examined results imply that higher income households without children and headed by an older white and higher educated individual spend more on wine away from home than do others on the other hand smaller midwestern and western households without children and headed by a younger and white individual spend more on beer away from home than do others

estimating a demand system with nonnegativity constraints mexican meat demand a new information based approach for estimating systems of many equations with nonnegativity constraints is presented this approach called generalized maximum entropy gme is more practical and

tax mix corners and other kinks abstractthis paper models the local tax mix determination process in the presence of statewide fiscal limitations the decentralized government finance archetype and shows how excess sensitivity of local public spending to grants the conventionally and somewhat misleadingly termed flypaper effect arises in the constrained tax mix irrespective of whether lower or upper limits bind and how it cannot in general be taken as a symptom of local government overspending an empirical application to italian province panel data provides consistent evidence of the role of corner solutions produced by two sided tax limits in explaining the sensitivity of local public expenditures to grants

modelling zeroes in microdata although the literature contains a number of suggestions for dealing with problems caused by a preponderance of zero expenditure observations that frequently occur in micro level budget studies in general these suggestions seem to be either empirically intractable or theoretically unappealing in this paper it is argued that a natural theoretical specification can be motivated by duality theory and that the statistical technique of compositional data analysis provides a corresponding complementary stochastic specification the resulting model is a consistent theoretical and stochastic specification for handling the possibility of a zero demand over a range of expenditures and or prices the model is then applied to the 1988 89 australian household expenditure survey

a demand systems analysis of food commodities by u s households segmented by income using the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption survey twelve food commodity groups were analyzed according to household poverty status parameter estimates were used to obtain subsistence expenditures own price elasticities expenditure elasticities and income elasticities own price elasticities were similar between the income groups for most commodities however income elasticities were consistently higher for the lower income group the use of average estimates of price and income elasticities for the population as a whole for the projection of individual commodity demands is not likely to be successful if notable changes are evident in income distribution

household energy demand in kenya an application of the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids abstract this paper estimates price and fuel expenditure elasticities of demand by applying the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids to 3665 households sampled across kenya in 2009 the results indicate that motor spirit premium msp automotive gas oil ago and lubricants are price elastic while fuel wood kerosene charcoal liquefied petroleum gas lpg and electricity are price inelastic kerosene is income elastic while fuel wood charcoal lpg electricity msp and ago are income inelastic the results also reveal fuel stack behaviour that is multiple fuel use among the households main policy implications of the results include increasing the penetration of alternative fuels as well as provision of more fiscal incentives to increase usage of cleaner fuels this not withstanding however the household income should be increased beyond a certain point for the household to completely shift and use a new fuel

household demand for fats and oils two step estimation of a censored demand system a censored system of household fat and oil demand equations is estimated with a two step procedure using cross sectional data from the 1987 1988 us nationwide food consumption survey own price and total expenditure elasticities are close to unity and there is no evidence of gross substitutability compensated elasticities suggest net substitution among the products considered

profit entry and changes in concentration abstract the simultaneity between profit entry and changes in concentration is examined the sample includes 481 observations on 4 digit industries over the years 1972 1977 and 1977 1982 results show that profits respond positively to entry barriers and initial concentration net entry responds positively to initial profits and responds negatively to entry barriers concentration moves toward its steady state level but the rate of adjustment is very slow the competitive process left on its own does not seem to move quickly toward equilibrium

what determines the elasticity of industry demand abstract this paper develops estimates of price elasticity of demand for a sample of u s food and tobacco manufacturing industries and tests a model explaining differences in interindustry elasticity the empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis that demand elasticity is in part determined by the competitive behavior of firms in an industry in particular high advertising expenditures result in lower elasticities of demand other important variables influencing demand elasticity are industry concentration the stage of production the existence of protection from domestic and foreign entry and the extent of new product introduction in a particular market

cost pass through in differentiated product markets the case of u s processed cheese in this paper we estimate a mixed logit model for demand in the u s processed cheese market the estimates are used to determine pass through rates of cost changes under different behavioral regimes we find that under collusion the pass through rates for all brands fall between 21 and 31 while under nash bertrand price competition the range of pass through rates is between 73 and 103 the mixed logit model provides a more flexible framework for studying pass through rates than the logit model since the curvature of the demand functions depends upon the empirical distribution of consumer types

efficiency and market power in greek food industries this paper uses firm level data to examine the market power versus efficiency hypothesis by taking into consideration both the long run behavior of profitability and the possible endogeneity bias among profitability market share and advertising variables in a sample of 266 greek food manufacturing firms in the period 1987 95 two stage least squares results show both a direct effect of firm characteristics and an indirect effect of industry characteristics on profitability which do not provide support for the efficiency hypothesis alone but they do show that profitability is affected by both firm and industry variables

hierarchic demand and the engel curve for variety ahstract the usual treatment of consumer demand theory assumes a solution to the demand equations with positive quantities of all commodities this paper characterises a class called hierarchic demand systems for which only a subset of commodities are in the purchased set the hierarchic linear expenditure svstem is used to illustrate interesting properties of such systems the empirical section shows how the number of commodities purchased expands with total expenditure both in aggregate and for commodity groups the data clearly establish the empirical importance of corner solutions and of the purchase decision in demand studies

concentration profitability and trade in a simultaneous equation analysis the case of taiwan this paper is the first attempt to use a simultaneous four equation system to study the role of foreign trade in the analysis of market structure and performance and the determinants of trade intensity in a newly industrializing country taiwan a cross sectional analysis is carried out with the manufacturing censuses of 1976 the results indicate that public enterprises significantly influence market structures and performance also import control measures influence import intensity significantly and offset potential impacts of imports on concentration and on profitability however trade intensity is mainly explained by comparative advantage rather than market forces concentration and profitability

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

the demand for dairy products structure prediction and decomposition this article presents an analysis of the demand for dairy products first the structure of dairy product demand is estimated using the household food consumption survey data under the assumption of a two stage budgeting procedure a complete demand system for food incorporating demographic effects is estimated next using the demand relations estimated from cross section data prediction interval tests utilizing time series data are performed for milk and butter last factors affecting consumption are classified into economic and demographic effects and a decomposition of the causes of changes in demand over time is performed

alcohol consumption censorship and misjudgement in the study of the economic determinants of alcohol consumption there is an under appreciated issue of sample selectivity as consumption is often not fully observed sample selectivity involves i

estimation and welfare calculations in a generalized corner solution model with an application to recreation demand the kuhn tucker model of wales and woodland 1983 provides a utility theoretic framework for estimating preferences over commodities for which individuals choose not to consume one or more of the goods due to the complexity of the model however there have been few applications in the literature and little attention has been paid to the problems of welfare analysis within the kuhn tucker framework this paper provides an application of the model to the problem of recreation demand in addition we develop and apply a methodology for estimating compensating variation relying on monte carlo integration to derive expected welfare changes

calculating marginal effects in models for zero expenditures in household budgets using a heckman type correction using the heckamn approach either in single equation or multi equation settings general expressions are derived for calculating marginal effects and elasticities in the conventional calculation of marginal effects terms related to the change in the inverse of mills ratio are omitted using data from the 19877 88 nationwide food consumption survey we calculate income and household size elasticities for 12 food commodities we compare the magnitudes and signs of the elasticities using the conventional expressions of marginal effects and our derived expressions bottomline sizeable differences especially in single equation applications can occur in calculating marginal effects if one fails to account for changes in the inverse of the mills ratio

inter industry differences in profitability the legacy of the structure efficiency debate revisited this study presents a simple model on the sources of inter industry variation in profitability and tests its empirical implications in order to shed new light on the long lasting debate over industry profitability the model identifies four key factors that jointly influence an industry s price cost margin i the intensity of strategic investment e g r d and advertising ii the skewness of the distribution of market share or market concentration iii the appropriability of strategic investment and iv the extent to which firms market shares are determined by the intensity of their strategic investment these factors are expected to be positively related to industry profitability and our empirical analysis provides supportive evidence the model also suggests that the conventional single dimensional hypotheses on profitability the market power or market structure hypothesis and the efficiency hypothesis are overly simplified more importantly existing empirical results allegedly supporting each of these hypotheses are spurious to the extent that the distribution of firm specific strategic competence reflects firm heterogeneity in efficiency and at the same time underlies the distribution of market share or market concentration copyright 2009 oxford university press

selection effects and heterogeneous demand responses to the berkeley soda tax vote early evidence from household level surveys suggests that the one cent per ounce tax on sugar sweetened beverages that took effect on march 1 2015 in berkeley california has decreased consumption of sugar sweetened beverages dramatically even if these findings are robust the public policy implications of expanding the berkeley soda tax policy to a national level are complicated by selection effects inherent in the populations of both voters and consumers we find that consumption responses related to the tax interact nontrivially with consumer heterogeneity some of these responses directly counter the public policy goals of a soda tax for example high consuming households are less price sensitive and therefore less responsive to price changes following a tax further reactance among high consuming populations led to increases in soda consumption immediately following the passage of the tax partially mitigating reductions in soda consumption

statistical models for zero expenditures in household budgets household budget surveys are an important source of data on consumer s expenditure not just for individual consumers but also for estimating national aggregates however it is a widespread finding that for certain commodities most notably tobacco and alcohol the estimate from the household survey falls short of the known consumption total calculated with some confidence from data on production imports exports and excise duties for example in the british family expenditure survey with which we shall largely be concerned total tobacco expenditure was underestimated in 1976 by 21 percent see kemsley redpath and holmes 1980 p 51 much of this understatement together with that on alcohol is thought to occur because of the design of the survey which excludes many persons amongst whom consumption of such items is thought to be atypically high e g prisoners hoteliers and their residents merchant seamen even so the possibility remains that some of the understatement is due to various types of misreporting by households included in the survey in this paper we consider a model in which the standard tobit specification tobin 1958 is supplemented by the operation of a simple binary censor the tobit model is essentially a linear regression model in which non positive observations of the dependent variable are replaced by zero we take this specification as our starting point but add a second censoring process that randomly replaces a fraction of the observations generated by the tobit model bv zeroes the combined model can serve as a representation of several types of

demographic effects in demand analysis estimation of the quadratic expenditure system using microdata the purpose of this paper is to estimate a complete theoretically plausible system of demand equations on microdata using the rich detail of these data to investigate the impact of demographic variables on demand behavior the system which we estimate is the quadratic expenditure system qes introduced by howe pollak and wales we evaluate four methods for incorporating demographic variables into the demand system three of these procedures imply parameter restrictions while the fourth does not tests on the restrictions imply that for our data unrestricted estimation yields significantly greater explanatory power

the demand for alcoholic beverages in spain the objective of this study is to analyze the main determinants of alcoholic beverages consumption at home data comes from the latest spanish household national survey which provides information on expenditure and quantities of different food products by household because households are interviewed only 1 week a large number of zeros have been recorded among the existing censured demand models the double hurdle dh model the purchase infrequency model and the tobit purchase infrequency model among others and after carrying out model selection tests the dh model has been finally estimated all expenditure elasticities are positive corresponding the highest value to spirits own price elasticities are negative and also in this case the spirits exhibit the highest value socio economic variables also play an important role in explaining consumer purchase and consumption decisions

on profitability and industrial concentration in pakistan abstract non inclusion of an important element of market structure in the profitability equation by earlier writers might have caused their estimates to suffer from specification error due to an omitted variable we have tried to formulate a more comprehensive model in which elasticity of demand advertising and concentration capture market structure while the supply side has been incorporated by including productivity other factors used to explain the degree of monopoly are capital intensity advertising and trade our results indicate that the main determinants of the profit margin are capital intensity rising productivity and industrial concentration we find that there was some dilution due to competition from foreign trade but its impact has been swayed by other factors

analysis of food away from home expenditure patterns for u s households 1982 89 the two step decision process for food away from home fafh consumption is empirically estimated using a generalization of the heien and wessells approach household information gathered by the national panel diary group is used for the analysis marginal effects are corrected by untangling the respective variable impacts on the inverse mills ratio expenditure and participation probability elasticities are similar to previous studies income elasticities are about 0 20 suggesting that the fafh commodity is a necessary good for u s society northeastern households are less likely to consume fafh than other households but their expenditures are higher on average

brand inertia in u s household cheese consumption to analyze u s consumers brand choices for cheese purchases we derive a set of discrete choice models from dynamic utility maximization acnielsen homescan survey data on u s households is used to estimate a dynamic probit model for each of the top brands for cheddar shredded and sliced cheese in four u s regions we find that households have strong brand inertia a result robust across alternative specifications predicted probabilities confirm greater inertia in the top brands and consumers are more likely to switch into them brand inertia is relatively larger in cheddar and sliced cheese especially in the central and southeast regions copyright 2008 oxford university press

prices poaching and protein alternatives an analysis of bushmeat consumption around serengeti national park tanzania abstract the consumption of meat from wild animals or bushmeat occurs throughout africa and highlights the conflict between two distinct development goals food security and biodiversity conservation growing human populations throughout the greater serengeti ecosystem rely heavily on bushmeat as a source of protein which places pressure on migratory wildlife populations this paper uses unique data from protein consumption surveys from 131 households over 34 months in a generalizable empirical framework to estimate price cross price and expenditure elasticities of protein sources and analyze the potential economic effects of policies to mitigate bushmeat hunting and consumption results suggest that 1 directly increasing the price of bushmeat through enforcement or other policies to reduce supply will have the most direct and largest effect of bushmeat consumption 2 increasing income increases bushmeat consumption as well as consumption of other meat sources 3 if surrounding fisheries experience a negative shock or collapse this will lead to a dramatic increase in bushmeat consumption overall these results strongly indicate that policies to reduce bushmeat hunting while maintaining food security must be considered in a broad and comprehensive framework

poverty alleviation in mozambique a multi market analysis of the role of food aid abstract the use of food aid in poverty alleviation programs has been hampered by two problems the inability to target to households in need and the disincentive effects on agriculture in this paper we present econometric estimates of in almost ideal demand system aids for households in maputo mozambique and develop a multi market model to show that in maputo imported yellow maize is not only self targeting but that owing to a combination of the low cross price elasticity with locally produced staples particularly white maize and cross border trade in food products the disincentive effects on domestic agriculture have been negligible

expenditure elasticities of the demand for leisure services although some research has already focused on the analysis of expenditure elasticities of leisure demand some shortcomings with regard to the content and the underlying theoretical model as well as the applied methods exist this article aims at avoiding these problems to provide consistent derivatives of leisure service expenditure elasticities therefore a regular demand system is derived from microeconomic duality theory to implement leisure specific demand factors i e demand and supply based sports and recreational opportunities as well as sports and recreational preferences while still being consistent with neoclassical demand theory the basic model is extended by applying the demographic translation framework data of the continuous household budget survey n 7724 from germany is used for the estimation of the derived demand system it is shown how sensitive the results are depending on the applied censored regression model 16 out of 18 analysed services are indicated as luxury goods b

profitability concentration imports and exports the case of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries based on an open economy oligopoly model causalities among domestic firms price cost margin pcm domestic concentration import and export shares are derived and a simultaneous equation system is established by utilizing the 1989 1997 data of taiwan s midstream petrochemical industries three stage least squares is used to estimate the system the empirical results confirm the derived results and demonstrate 1 there exist simultaneous relationships among domestic pcm domestic concentration import and export shares 2 import concentration affects domestic concentration positively but affects domestic pcm import and export shares negatively 3 diversifying international markets improves domestic firms pcm 4 domestic firms seem to be in a situation of collusion

shifting sands the changing case for monetizing project food aid in bangladesh abstract monetization involves local sale of food aid commodities and using the cash to finance other programs to explore the likely consequences of monetization this paper combines a stockpile of recent microeconomic evidence from food and cash for work projects in bangladesh together with a multimarket simulation model results suggest that a switch from food for work s ffw in kind deliveries of wheat to an identical wheat financed cash for work cfw program would unambiguously improve welfare of the poor

the influence of increased foreign competition on industrial concentration and profitability abstract this paper uses the chilean manufacturing censuses of 1967 and 1979 to examine the effects of the chilean reforms in the mid 1970s on market structure and performance the reforms substantially increased the concentration in industry and substantially reduced profitability these outcomes are interpreted in the light of hypotheses about the effect of potential entrants on market structure and on the pricing behavior of incumbents next a cross sectoral simultaneous equations model of structure and performance is estimated to isolate the contribution of import and export shares to cross sectoral variations in concentration and profitability and to test for structural change between the two censuses the analysis confirms that the liberalization of trade changed the way import and export shares determined profitability and supports the import discipline hypothesis

designing a tax to discourage unhealthy food and beverage purchases the case of chile the global shift towards diets high in sugar sweetened beverages ssbs and energy dense ultra processed foods is linked to higher prevalence of obesity diabetes and most other noncommunicable diseases ncds causing significant health costs chile has the highest ssb consumption in the world very high junk food intake and very rapid increases in these poor components of the diet plus obesity prevalence this study s purpose is to compare the effect of different tax schemes for ssbs and ultra processed foods on nutrient availability utilizing price elasticities which are estimated from a quadratic almost ideal demand system model using the 2011 2012 income and expenditure survey we take into account the high proportion of households not purchasing various food and beverage groups censored nature of data the food groups considered were sweets and desserts salty snacks and chips meat products and fats fruits vegetables and seafood cereals and cereal products ssb ready to drink ssb from concentrate plain water coffee and tea and milk which together represent 90 of food expenditures the simulated taxes were 1 40 price tax on ssbs 22 above the current tax level 2 a 5 cents per gram of sugar tax on products with added sugar and 3 30 price tax on all foods 27 above current tax levels and beverages 12 above the current tax level exceeding thresholds on sodium saturated fat and added sugar and for which marketing is restricted based on a chilean law effective june 16 2016 unhealthy foods are price elastic 1 99 for salty snacks and chips 1 06 for ssbs ready to drink and 1 27 for ssbs from concentrate meaning that the change in consumption is proportionally larger with respect to a change in price results are robust to different model specification and consistent among different socioeconomic sub populations overall the tax on marketing controlled foods and beverages is associated with the largest reduction in household purchases of sodium added sugar saturated fat and calorie purchases chile is unique in currently having instituted a small current ssb tax as well as marketing controls and front of package labeling of unhealthy foods and beverages the design of a larger more comprehensive tax to enhance the overall effect of these policies on healthier diets is a next critical step this study shows that a large tax on the same foods and beverages already delineated as unhealthy by the marketing controls and front of pack labeling should prove to be more effective for promoting a healthier diet

the food system transformation in developing countries a disaggregate demand analysis for fruits and vegetables in vietnam abstract food systems in developing countries are currently undergoing a rapid transformation towards high value products and modern supply chains while supply side aspects of this transformation have been analyzed previously issues of consumer demand have received much less attention this article analyses demand patterns for fresh fruits and vegetables in vietnam using household survey data and a demand systems approach demand for products from modern supply chains particularly supermarkets and non traditional imports is highly income elastic and the income effect is stronger than the impact of prices and supermarket penetration this highlights the importance of considering demand side aspects when projecting future trends our results imply a continued restructuring of the food sector in the further process of economic development

a sample selection approach to censored demand systems the multivariate sample selection model is extended to a nonlinear equation system with partial selection and applied to household meat consumption in china elasticity estimates differ from those obtained from conventional maximum likelihood and tobit estimates chinese meat products are gross complements while net substitution also exists in some cases the use of micro survey data has been popular in estimating consumer demand equations important features of microdata include censored dependent variables estimation procedures for censored consumer demand systems include the primal kuhn tucker approach of wales and woodland 1983 dual virtualprice approach of lee and pitt 1986 and the tobit system amemiya 1974 estimated by generalized maximum entropy golan perloff and shen 2001 and maximum simulated likelihood dong gould and kaiser 2004 yen lin and smallwood 2003 procedures less efficient alternatives include the quasi maximum likelihood estimator yen lin and smallwood 2003 the generalized method of moments estimator meyerhoefer ranney and sahn 2005 and a number of two step estimators heien and wessells 1990 perali and chavas 2000 shonkwiler and yen 1999 yen 2005 recently proposed a maximum likelihood ml procedure for the multivariate sample selection model mssm an extension of the bivariate sample selection model heckman 1979 which had motivated the procedures of heien and wessells 1990 and shonkwiler and yen 1999 the mssm was developed in the context of linear equations and in addition is not strictly applicable for a partially selective equation system viz

food expenditures and household demographic composition in the us a demand systems approach food expenditures and subsistence quantities of poverty status and non poverty status us households are analysed within a linear expenditure system that postulates subsistence quantities to be linear combinations of demographic variables using the us bureau of labor statistics 1992 consumer expenditure survey and detailed monthly consumer price indices this article obtains expenditure elasticities own price elasticities and subsistence quantities for each income group across nine broadly aggregated food commodity groups elasticity estimates and subsistence quantity estimates differ across income groups supporting the premise that policies targeted at specific income groups should be based on the target group s elasticity estimates rather than average population elasticities parameter estimates are then used to simulate how subsistence quantities and own price elasticities can be expected to vary according to the demographic composition of the household within a specific income group

the determinants of exit in an open economy in this paper the determinants of exit are investigated for the manufacturing sector of the united states economy which has been subjected to growing international influences the analysis uses united states cross sectional data the results of the exit equation suggest that low profitability declining industry growth and displacement of incumbents by entrants foster exit international influences are also seen to have an impact on u s manufacturing exit specifically imports into an industry have a small effect on exit and protection has little influence in stemming exit

the implications of heterogeneous habit in consumer beverage purchases on soda and sin taxes abstract in this article we study the heterogeneity of habit strength in households demand for regular carbonated sweetened beverages csbs and beer in the united states a demand model that nests a smooth transition function is used to describe habit based consumption patterns revealing heterogeneous strengths of habits among households we find that more habitual consumers those with a strong preference for a particular product are not as sensitive to price or expenditure as the aggregate population this finding is further supported by simulations of the potential effects of soda and beer taxes we find the aggregate response to soda and beer taxes is smaller than when the influence of habit is assumed to be homogeneous

impacts of world prices transmission to domestic rice markets in rural iran abstract this paper attempts to assess the degree to which iranian rural households have responded to the change in price of imported rice due to exchange rate unification and to examine the extent to which the policy has affected the economic welfare of various household income groups particularly the poor utilizing samples of 2472 households selected from national expenditure survey data of 2002 and 2003 armington and pass through elasticities were calculated as two measures of substitutability and are discussed separately for each household group in these areas the findings of this study indicate that domestic rice prices are associated differently with imported rice prices among the households however a price increase in imported rice that is mainly consumed by the poor worsens their position much more severely than for the rich people who mainly prefer domestic rice the findings contribute to the understanding of how price changes resulting from trade liberalization may affect various groups of households and the ways they respond to such changes in prices

semiparametric estimation of consumer demand systems with micro data maximum likelihood and two step estimators of censored demand systems yield biased and inconsistent parameter estimates when the assumed joint distribution of disturbances is incorrect this paper proposes a semiparametric estimator that retains the computational advantage of the two step approach but is immune to distributional misspecification the key difference between the proposed estimator and the two step estimator is that the parameters of the binary censoring equations are estimated using a distribution free single index model we implement the proposed estimator using household level data obtained from the hainan province in china specification test lends support to our approach

improving the efficiency targeting of malawi s farm input subsidy programme big pain small gain abstract the farm input subsidy programme fisp in malawi was introduced in the 2005 2006 season against a background of bad weather affecting production and prolonged food shortages vouchers are distributed empowering eligible farmers to exchange them for fixed quantities of inputs at subsidized prices since its inception there has been a debate at national level about whether the fisp s potential has been fully exploited with policy makers exploring options to improve the programme proposals include targeting efficient and productive farmers to maximize returns in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of these proposed changes to the existing fisp design by utilizing two waves of the lsms isa survey merged with climatic data we estimate how the national demand for agricultural inputs varies according to a variation in the targeting criteria by means of a two stage demand system then we identify more efficient farmers by means of a stochastic frontier approach we observe a mismatch between voucher recipients and efficiency with approximately 60 of vouchers being allocated to the three bottom quintiles of efficiency this mismatch is observed also at the spatial level with more vouchers going to districts characterized by less efficient production while concerns on the distributional impacts of the new criteria are discussed together with some suggestions for spatially diversifying the structuring of the policy and incentivizing crop diversification our results highlight a high substitutability of commercial with subsidized inputs by new eligible farmers consequently simulating the targeting policy variation we obtain an outcome that would lead only to a limited increases in predicted food expenditure ranging from 0 27 to 0 8 and maize production from 0 2 to 1 3 scope for analysing different adjustments in the functioning of fisp are thus proposed to policy makers

a censored system of cigarette and alcohol consumption many previous studies of us cigarette and alcohol consumption have focused on single equations however the addictive nature of consumption suggests that it is more appropriate to model these products as a system we propose a two step estimation procedure and apply the procedure to a system of equations for cigarette beer and wine consumption results differ from those derived from an existing two step procedure findings suggest that consumption of cigarettes beer and wine is responsive to income changes but the elasticities are rather small personal physiques education age race ethnicity health gender employment status and regions also play significant roles in consumption

price and income elasticities of demand for passenger transport fuels in spain implications for public policies abstract the significant increase in passenger transport activity cars experienced by spain and its associated increase in energy consumption have several associated negative aspects including a greater dependence on foreign energy sources and higher ghg emissions therefore reducing the level of transport activity would bring important socioeconomic and environmental benefits the aim of this paper which focuses on energy consumption in the passenger transport is fourfold 1 to provide a diagnostic of energy consumption in the spanish passenger transport system and the related problems 2 to develop a model to calculate price and income elasticities of demand for transport fuel 3 to apply this model to the spanish passenger transport sector 4 to infer policy recommendations derived from the results of the diagnostic and the model it is claimed that in view of those low price elasticities and high income elasticities and if a reduction in the scale of transport activity is deemed socially desirable a combination of instruments is necessary fuel taxes play an important role within this combination apart from their long term effects the low price elasticity of demand for transport fuel would allow the collection of a significant amount of revenues which could eventually be earmarked to encourage reductions in private transport demand and modal shifts with other instruments

does an endogenous relationship exist between environmental and economic performance a resource based view on the horticultural sector the aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between environmental and economic performance from the resource based theory within firms of the fresh fruit and vegetables sector this study considers that the adoption of environment friendly practices has a greater influence on firms opportunities and abilities in the agricultural sector than in manufacturing sectors and leads to closer links between performance variables the reference for this empirical analysis is a panel data of horticultural farming marketing firms in spain the voluntary environmental programmes and the heterogeneity of their application lead us to regard acquiring a competitive advantage as a relevant driver to improve environmental performance in this sector a simultaneous equations model is suggested reflecting the differential environmental effect and the assumption of endogeneity among variables the results show a positive impact of environmental differentiation on profitability and market share also suggesting that the perception of this positive experience implies greater environmental performance

a sample selection model for prepared food expenditures the factors affecting household expenditures on four types of prepared food products from a sample selection model estimated using a two step method are explored results suggest that several variables affect household expenditures on various prepared food products factors examined are presence of children number of earners region household size seasonality age race education and income

a note on heckman type corrections in models for zero expenditures in heien and wessells 1990 a two step estimation procedure that makes use of heckman type corrections is proposed to estimate consumption on household budget surveys it is shown that this approach which draws from switching regressions models leads to inconsistent estimates

the quantity and variety of households meat purchases a censored demand system approach this study investigates the demand for 10 disaggregated meat products by u s households a censored demand system which imposes budget constraints in both observed and latent shares is estimated along with a detailed explanation of the estimation procedure additional details about the methodology not provided in previous studies should help researchers to empirically apply the model an innovation of the study is to introduce the censored demand system model for studying the variety of a household s food purchases most households buy between seven and eight different products and hardly change the variety of their purchases with changes in meat expenditure