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It is unclear which energy expenditure prediction equation should guide weight loss interventions in older adults with obesity. We ascertained the validity of four equations commonly used in practice in a series of weight loss studies of adults aged ≥65 with a body mass index ≥30kg/m(2) using indirect calorimetry data. Diagnostic accuracy was defined as

With the framework of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study explores factors explaining the motivations of women to use mail-order birth control. An online survey was conducted with 603 women aged 18-44 from states in the southern and midwestern US. Five in-depth phone interviews supplemented the numeric and verbatim data provided by the survey. Our study finds that women with positive attitudes toward purchasing birth control online are more likely to use such a service. Perceived norms also have a positive impact on their intention to purchase mail-order birth control. Women with prior experience of communicating with online doctors are more likely to order birth control online. However, women have mixed views on the advantages and disadvantages of online doctor-patient communication, insurance coverage, and the reliability of telemedicine. Previous strategies for promoting mail-order birth control have focused on reducing financial burdens or saving time. There is little to no research that addressed psychological factors that affect the purchase behavior of mail-order birth control. This study helps us better understand how women’s attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived barriers influence the use of mail-order birth control services.

We provide an introduction to the estimation of discrete choice models when choice sets are heterogeneous and unobserved to the econometrician. We survey the two most popular approaches: “integrating over” and “differencing out” unobserved choice sets. Inspired by Chamberlain (1980)’s original idea of constructing sufficient statistics from observed choices, we introduce the term “sufficient set” to refer to any combination of observed choices that lies within the true but unobserved choice set. The concept of sufficient set helps to unify notation and organize our thinking, to map econometric assumptions onto economic models, and to implement both methods in practice.

The share of home-cooked food in the diet of UK households declined from the 1980s. This was contemporaneous with a decline in the market price of ingredients for home cooking relative to ready-to-eat foods. We consider a simple model of food consumption and time use that captures the key driving forces behind these apparently conflicting trends. We show that observed behaviour can be rationalised by the fact that the shadow price of home-cooked food, which accounts for the fact that cooking takes time, has risen relative to the price of ready-to-eat food, due to the increase in the market value of time of secondary earners. We discuss the implications for policies that aim to encourage healthier diets.

Young people in the UK consume far above the maximum recommended levels of added sugar. It is likely that neither they nor their parents fully take account of the future health, social and economic costs of this high sugar consumption. This provides a rationale for policy intervention. The majority of young people's added sugar consumption occurs in the home, where purchases are typically made by parents. This means that understanding the purchase decisions of adults is important for policy design, even if the policies aim to reduce the consumption of young people. We discuss the merits of popular policies, including taxes, advertising restrictions and restrictions on the availability of specific foods, and we identify promising avenues for future research.

Obesity rates in the United Kingdom, and around the world, are high and rising. They are higher, and rising faster, amongst people growing up and living in deprivation. These patterns raise potential concerns about both market failures and equity. There is much that policy can do to address these concerns. However, policy can also do harm if it is poorly targeted or has unintended consequences. In order to design effective policies we need an understanding of who we are trying to target, and for what reasons. This paper provides an overview of some of the evidence, and some recent policy initiatives.

We evaluate the impact of a price floor for alcohol introduced in Scotland in 2018, using a difference-in-differences strategy with England as a control group. We show that the policy led to the largest reductions in alcohol units purchased among the heaviest drinkers—the group who, at the margin, are likely to create the largest externalities from drinking. The price floor is well targeted at heavy drinkers because they buy a much greater fraction of their units from cheap products and switched away from these products strongly, with only limited substitution towards more expensive products. We show that if the marginal external cost of drinking is at least moderately higher for heavy than lighter drinkers, then a price floor outperforms an ethanol tax. However, more flexible tax systems can achieve similar reductions in externalities to the price floor, but avoid the large transfers from public funds to the alcohol industry that arise under the floor.

This article describes a needs analysis case study to inform the instructional design of a multinational capacity building project in humanitarian logistics. Survey responses from 106 foreign partner non-governmental organizations (NGOs) of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) were collected to gain insights into organizations’ access to technology, levels of confidence in five logistics process areas, the strengths of previous capacity building projects, and organizational strategies and methods for capacity building. Results show that staff have access to mobile phones and computers and prefer to use the latter for learning. It was also found that not all NGOs implemented all the common logistics processes of an emergency response. Further, respondents preferred participatory approaches to scenario-based training over lecture-style presentations. Instructional design recommendations based on these results are shared as well as lessons learned which may help instructional designers working for multinational organizations design their needs analysis projects.

National audience; Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. Policymakers highlight the young, particularly from poor backgrounds, and high sugar consumers as groups whose behavior they would most like to influence. There are also concerns about the policy being regressive. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities.

The spread of COVID‐19 has led to sweeping changes in the way households work, spend their time and shop resulting in different shopping patterns and rapid price changes in some goods. How will changes such as these be reflected in headline inflation measures such as the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)? This paper discusses problems in interpreting the CPI as a measure of how the cost of living is changing during the lockdown. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

Young people in the UK consume far above the maximum recommended levels of added sugar. It is likely that neither they nor their parents fully take account of the future health, social and economic costs of this high sugar consumption. This provides a rationale for policy intervention. The majority of young people's added sugar consumption occurs in the home, where purchases are typically made by parents. This means that understanding the purchase decisions of adults is important for policy design, even if the policies aim to reduce the consumption of young people. We discuss the merits of popular policies, including taxes, advertising restrictions and restrictions on the availability of specific foods, and we identify promising avenues for future research.

Governments are starting to ease restrictions to economic activity. The risks of easing these measures too soon, or in misguided ways, are obvious, not only for public health but also for the economy. A world with no lockdown and a [Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)] pandemic spreading rapidly through the population does not make for a healthy economy; nor, in all likelihood, does a world in which containment measures have to be repeatedly reinstated after being eased prematurely or in suboptimal ways. We discuss some key economic issues that the UK government needs to face when thinking about how best to get people back into work: we assemble some basic empirical evidence, identify some challenges that policymakers will need to confront, and discuss some policy considerations.

The spread of COVID-19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this paper we describe how this impact has varied across industries using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

We provide new evidence on retailers’ pricing and advertising of store brands in the UK grocery markets. We analyse a simple Hotelling model in which retailers and manufacturers endogenously advertise their respective brands; we account for the impact of advertising on retailer–manufacturer bargaining and downstream competition. The model predicts that retailers advertise their store brands less when advertising is more rivalrous. We present empirical evidence consistent with this prediction. According to our model, aggregate consumer surplus can be higher with store brands than when they are absent from the market.

Corrective taxes have been implemented in a number of countries with the aim of addressing growing concern about the rise in obesity- and diet-related diseases. The rationale is that food consumption imposes costs on the consumer in the future that they do not fully take into account at the point of consumption ('internalities'). Corrective taxes have the potential to improve welfare by reducing suboptimally high consumption. We review the literature on the size of these internalities and on the optimal corrective tax, which depends on the patterns of internalities, the price responsiveness of consumers, and on redistributive aims.

The rise in obesity has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption. We show that official government household survey data indicate that levels of calorie consumption have declined in England between 1980 and 2013; while there has been an increase in calories from food eaten out at restaurants, fast food, soft drinks and confectionery, overall there has been a decrease in total calories purchased. Households have shifted towards more expensive calories, both by substituting away from home production towards market production, and substituting towards higher quality foods. We show that the decline in calories can be partially, but not entirely, rationalized with weight gain by a decline in the strenuousness of work and daily life. (JEL: D12, I12, I18)

Improving diet quality has been a major target of public health policy. Governments have encouraged consumers to make healthier food choices and fi rms to reformulate food products. Evaluation of such policies has focused on the impact on consumer behaviour; firm behaviour has been less well studied. We study the recent decline in dietary salt intake in the UK, and show that it was entirely attributable to product reformulation by fi rms; a contemporaneous information campaign had little impact, consumer switching between products in fact worked in the opposite direction and led to a slight increase in the salt intensity of groceries purchased. These findings point to the important role that fi rms can play in achieving public policy goals.

We document that within-individual variation in food choices is substantial and has potentially important consequences for nutrition, and hence well-being. We develop an approach that allows us to study the determinants of this within-individual variation within an economic framework and allow for across-individual preference heterogeneity. We show that around one-fifth of within-individual fluctuations in diet quality is explained by standard economic variables (prices and budgets), along with advertising and weather. The residual fluctuations are important and are larger for lower income and younger people, and individuals who state they are impulsive. We propose a two-selves model of food purchase behavior to structurally interpret these empirical patterns. We use nonparametric revealed preference techniques to show that this model rationalizes our food purchase data., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Historically, quantitative marketers have largely left public policy and social consideration to economists. This has started to change, and there is considerable potential for marketing to impact policy debates in important ways. We focus on two policy areas – competition policy and nutrition policy – and discuss how quantitative market has and can continue to impact policy decision making. In competition policy economists have been using the models and methods of quant marketing and IO to influence actual policy. The effect, at least up to now, has been smaller in nutrition policy. However, in both areas there is scope for great impact from recent research. Marketers should need to pay more attention to the policy debates because: (i) a proper discussion of firm and consumer interaction, which is at the heart of marketing, cannot be complete without accounting for the regulatory, legal, and policy environment, and (ii) a greater involvement with policy will help marketers shape their research in relevant and interesting directions.

Matched employee-employer data from the UK are used to analyze the wage premium to working in an innovative firm. We find that firms that are more R&D intensive pay higher wages on average, and this is particularly true for workers in some low-skilled occupations. We propose a model in which a firm's innovativeness is reflected in the degree of complementarity between workers in low-skill and high-skilled occupations, and in which non-verifiable soft skills are an important determinant of the wages of workers in low-skilled occupations. The model yields additional predictions on training, tenure and outsourcing which we also find support for in data.

Random utility models are widely used to study consumer choice. The vastmajority of applications assume utility is linear in consumption of the outsidegood, which imposes that total expenditure on the subset of goods of interestdoes not affect demand for inside goods and restricts demand curvature and passthrough.We show that relaxing these restrictions can be important, particularlyif one is interested in the distributional effects of a policy change, even in amarket for a small budget share product category. We consider the use of taxpolicy to lower fat consumption and show that a specific (per unit) tax resultsin larger reductions than an ad valorem tax, but at greater cost to consumers.

Over the Great Recession real wages stagnated and unemployment increased. Concurrently, food prices rose sharply, outstripping growth in food expenditure, and leading to a reduction in calories purchased. This has led to concern about rising food poverty. We study British households to assess how they adjusted to changes in the economic environment. We show they switched to cheaper calories; implying food consumption was smoother than expenditure. We use longitudinal data to quantify the way households lowered their per calorie spending, and show they done this in part by increasing shopping effort, and without lowering the nutritional quality of their groceries.

Shocks to world commodity prices and the depreciation of sterling led to a large increase in the price of food in the UK. It also resulted in large changes in the relative prices of different foods. We document these changes, and consider how they affected the composition of households' shopping baskets. We isolate the impact of changes in relative food prices from variation in preferences using data on purchasing decisions made by a representative panel of British households. We show that changes in relative food prices led to a worsening in the nutritional quality of households' shopping baskets, though this was partially mitigated by offsetting changes in preferences.

We study optimal corrective taxation in the alcohol market. Consumption generates negative externalities that are non-linear in the total amount of alcohol consumed. If tastes for products are heterogeneous and correlated with marginal externalities, then varying tax rates on different products can lead to welfare gains. We study this problem in an optimal tax framework and empirically for the UK alcohol market. Welfare gains from optimally varying rates are higher the more concentrated externalities are amongst heavy drinkers. A sufficient statistics approach is informative about the direction of reform, but not about optimal rates when externalities are highly concentrated.

Revenues from corporate income taxes have remained relatively stable as a share of national income over the last three decades despite reductions in corporate tax rates and increased opportunities for multinational tax avoidance. This is largely explained by an increase in the share of corporate profits in national income. In this paper, we discuss the sources of corporate profits, and specifically corporate taxable profits; these include a normal return to capital investment, returns to labour or entrepreneurial effort that are realised as dividends or capital gains, and returns to market power. We relate these components of profits to the ways that corporate taxes can change incentives to invest or exert effort, and we discuss some implications for policy.

The theoretical effects of labour regulations such as employment protection legislation (EPL) on innovation is ambiguous, and empirical evidence has thus far been inconclusive. EPL increases job security and the greater enforceability of job contracts may increase worker investment in innovative activity. On the other hand EPL increases adjustment costs faced by firms, and this may lead to under-investment in activities that are likely to require adjustment, including technologically advanced innovation. In this paper we find empirical evidence that both effects are at work - multinational enterprises locate more innovative activity in countries with high EPL, however they locate more technologically advanced innovation in countries with low EPL. This research is forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics.

a b s t r a c t Existing hedonic methods cannot be easily adapted to estimate willingness to pay for product character- istics when willingness to pay depends on a very large basket of goods. We show how to marry these methods with revealed preference arguments to estimate bounds on willingness to pay using data on purchases of seemingly impossibly high dimensional baskets of goods. This allows us to use observed purchase prices and quantities on a large basket of products to learn about individual household's will- ingness to pay for characteristics, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility and also avoiding the biases that arise from inappropriate aggregation. We illustrate the approach using scanner data on food purchases to estimate bounds on willingness to pay for the organic characteristic.

Recombinant innovation, the combination of existing ideas, is important for technological progress; we want to understand how important market frictions are in stifling the transmission of ideas from one firm to another. Although the theoretical literature emphasizes the importance of these frictions, direct empirical evidence on them is limited. We use comprehensive data on patent applications from the European Patent Office and a multiple spells duration model to provide estimates that suggest that they are substantial. It is around 30% more costly to successfully discover and utilize new ideas created in another firm than in your own. This compares to the increased costs of accessing new ideas across national borders of around 7%, and across technologies of around 20%. These result point towards substantial imperfections in the market for technology.

There is growing policy concern with encouraging better dietary choices. We show that a nationally-implemented voucher policy - the UK Healthy Start Scheme - increased spending on fruit and vegetables by 15 percent. However, the effects were heterogeneous: only households that previously spent less than the value of the voucher increased spending; the voucher was equivalent to a cash benefit for households already spending more than this value. These responses are in line with standard economic predictions. Although aspects of the policy might have been expected to stimulate a wider behavioural response, there is no evidence for this.

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market – the potato chips market. We exploit consumer level exposure to adverts to estimate demand, allowing advertising to potentially shift the weight consumers place on product healthiness, tilt demand curves, have dynamic effects and spillover effects across brands. We simulate the impact of a ban and show that the potential health benefits are partially offset by firms lowering prices and by consumer switching to other junk foods.

We adapt the Bresnahan and Reiss (1991. Entry and competition in concentrated markets. The Journal of Political Economy 99, no. 5: 977–1009) model to allow for multiple store formats. We estimate the model using data for English supermarkets, and evaluate the impact of restrictive planning regulation on entry into the English grocery retail industry. We find that more restrictive planning regulation reduces the number of large format supermarkets in equilibrium. However, the impact is overstated if variation in demographic characteristics across markets is not also controlled for. Our estimates suggest that restrictive planning regulation leads to a loss to consumers of up to £10 m per annum. This cost must be offset against any benefits that arise, e.g. due to reduced congestion.

We examine the “home bias” of knowledge spillovers (the idea that knowledge spreads more slowly over international boundaries than within them) as measured by the speed of patent citations. We present econometric evidence that the geographical localization of knowledge spillovers has fallen over time, as we would expect from the dramatic fall in communication and travel costs. Our proposed estimator controls for correlated fixed effects and censoring in duration models, and we apply it to data on over two million patent citations between 1975 and 1999. Home bias is exaggerated in models that do not control for fixed effects. The fall in home bias over time is weaker for the pharmaceuticals and information/communication technology sectors where agglomeration externalities may remain strong.

Governments around the world are increasingly concerned about the rise in diet-related chronic disease and there has been increased interest in policy interventions targeted at changing eating habits. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which food markets might fail to deliver the optimal outcome and how this may justify government intervention. We consider how well different types of policies – information campaigns, taxes and regulations – are able to counteract these market failures and we consider some of the implementation issues associated with targeting different consumers and anticipating firms' strategic responses.

European Union countries have implemented widespread reforms to productmarkets in order to stimulate competition, innovation and economic growth. We provideempirical evidence that the reforms carried out under the EU Single Market Programme(SMP) were associated with increased product market competition, as measured by areduction in average profitability, and with a subsequent increase in innovation intensityand productivity growth for manufacturing sectors. In our analysis we exploit exogenousvariation in the expected impact of the SMP across countries and industries to identify theeffects of reforms on average profitability, and the effects of profitability on innovationand productivity growth. European Union countries have implemented widespread reforms to productmarkets in order to stimulate competition, innovation and economic growth. We provideempirical evidence that the reforms carried out under the EU Single Market Programme(SMP) were associated with increased product market competition, as measured by areduction in average profitability, and with a subsequent increase in innovation intensityand productivity growth for manufacturing sectors. In our analysis we exploit exogenousvariation in the expected impact of the SMP across countries and industries to identify theeffects of reforms on average profitability, and the effects of profitability on innovationand productivity growth.

Data from market research firms are increasingly being used by social science researchers. These data provide potentially useful information, including detailed nutritional information and well-measured prices, and their panel structure is appealing as it permits researchers to control for unobservable time-invariant household characteristics and to model dynamic aspects of household behaviour. We summarise the information on the nutrients in foods that is contained in one source of market research data. We show that there is a lot of variation in nutrients at the individual product level, even within narrowly defined food categories such as butter. We also show that the duration of time over which data are collected can have important implications for analysis of household-level nutrient purchases.

This paper examines productivity catch-up as a source of establishment productivity growth. We present evidence that, other things equal, establishments further behind the industry frontier experience faster rates of productivity growth. Geographic proximity to frontier firms makes catch-up faster. Our econometric specification implies a long-run relationship between productivity levels, where nonfrontier establishments lie a steady-state distance behind the frontier such that their rate of productivity growth including catch-up equals productivity growth at the frontier. We use our econometric estimates to quantify the implied contribution to productivity growth of catch-up to both the national and regional productivity frontiers.

This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets. How much can and do households save through each of these behaviors? How do these patterns vary with consumer demographics? We use data collected by a marketing firm on all food purchases brought into the home for a large, nationally representative sample of U.K. households in 2006. We are interested in how consumer choice affects the measurement of price changes. In particular, a standard price index based on a fixed basket of goods will overstate the rise in the true cost of living because it does not properly consider sales and bulk purchasing. According to our measures, the extent of this bias might be of the same or even greater magnitude than the better-known substitution and outlet biases.

This article exploits a quasi‐experimental setting to estimate the impact that a commonly used performance‐related pay scheme had on branch performance in a large distribution firm. The scheme, which is based on the Balanced Scorecard, was implemented in all branches in one division but not in another. Branches from the second division are used as a control group. Our results suggest that the Balanced Scorecard had some impact but that it varied with branch characteristics, and, in particular, branches with more experienced managers were better able to respond to the new incentives.

The poor productivity performance of the UK and the EU when compared with the US has been a major driver of policy reforms over the past decade. This paper considers what the evidence suggests about why we have lagged behind the US, considering among other factors the importance of globalisation and outsourcing, the role for public policy intervention and what the key drivers of growth are likely to be for the future.

We examine whether discretionary government grants influence where domestic and multinational firms locate new plants, and how the presence of agglomeration externalities interacts with these policy instruments. We find that a region's existing industrial structure has an effect on the location of new entrants. Grants do have a small effect in attracting plants to specific geographic areas, but importantly, we find that firms are less responsive to government subsidies in areas where there are fewer existing plants in their industry. This suggests that these subsidies are less effective in influencing firms' location decisions in the face of countervailing co-location benefits.

We analyze the impact of product market competition on unemployment and wages, and how this depends on labour market institutions. We use differential changes in regulations across OECD countries over the 1980s and 1990s to identify the effects of competition. We find that increased product market competition reduces unemployment, and that it does so more in countries with labour market institutions that increase worker bargaining power. The theoretical intuition is that both firms with market power and unions with bargaining power are constrained in their behaviour by the elasticity of demand in the product market. We also find that the effect of increased competition on real wages is beneficial to workers, but less so when they have high bargaining power. Intuitively, real wages increase through a drop in the general price level, but workers with bargaining power lose out somewhat from a reduction in the rents that they had previously captured.

This article reports a systematic review of literature undertaken to identify characteristics and experiences of anticipatory mourning in caregivers of teenagers and young adults with life-limiting or life-threatening conditions. A comprehensive literature search was conducted using the key words ‘anticipatory’, ‘mourning’, ‘grief’, and synonyms. This review focused on six studies that met inclusion criteria and reported characteristics of anticipatory mourning in caregivers of teenagers and young adults. Characteristics and experiences were sorted into four main themes: symptoms; a sense of loss; caregiver behaviour; and the unique experience of caring for, or losing, a teenager or young adult. The review suggests that there are characteristics and experiences of anticipatory mourning that are unique to caregivers of this age group. The review also suggests that consideration of anticipatory mourning is important in offering holistic care to young adults and their caregivers, and points to the need for further research in this area.