The impact of variation in diet quality across individuals on obesity and diet-related disease has received much attention, but variation in individuals’ diet quality over time less so. This column combines British data on food purchases with a model in which individual choice is driven by the influence of a healthy self and an unhealthy self to examine self-control problems in food choice. The results indicate that self-control problems in food purchases are important, and that the interaction of the mechanisms at play merits investigation.
Read the full article at VoxEU.
Authors
Rachel Griffith
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Martin O'Connell
Martin, previously Deputy Research Director, is a Research Fellow at IFS and Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin.
Kate Smith
Kate is an IFS Research Fellow and an Assistant Professor at LSE, interested in public finance, industrial organisation and applied microeconomics.
Laurens Cherchye
Laurens is a Research Associate of the IFS and a Professor in the Department of Economics, KU Leuven.
Bram De Rock
Bram is a Research Associate of the IFS, a Professor of Economics at ULB and a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at KU Leuven.
Frederic Vermeulen
Frederic is a Research Associate of the IFS, a Professor of Economics at the University of Leuven and a Research Fellow at the CEPR.
More from IFS
Understand this issue
Policy analysis
Academic research
