Is the Focus on Food Deserts Fruitless? Retail Access and Food Purchases Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum / Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Handbury, Jessie.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Rahkovsky, Ilya.

Schnell, Molly.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21126.

NBER working paper series no. w21126

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

Using novel data describing the healthfulness of household food purchases and the retail landscapes consumers face, we measure the role of access in explaining why wealthier and more educated households purchase healthier foods. We find that spatial differences in access, though significant, are small relative to spatial differences in the nutritional content of sales. Socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption exist even among households with equivalent access, and the healthfulness of household consumption responds minimally to improvements in local retail environments. Our results indicate that access-improving policies alone will eliminate less than one third of existing socioeconomic disparities in nutritional consumption.

This paper has been subsumed by the authors' later combined <a href=/papers/w24094>work</a>

Notes:

Print version record

April 2015.