Professor Martin O'Connell

Over the Great Recession, UK households reduced real food expenditure. We show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour.

In the recent Budget, the Chancellor introduced a tax on the sugar content of soft drinks, citing concerns about childhood obesity. This tax will be introduced in 2018 and will not apply to fruit juices or milk-based drinks. It has followed calls from various bodies for intervention to reduce people’s sugar consumption. In this briefing note, we provide some descriptive evidence on the main sources of dietary sugar and we lay out some of the economic issues related to the introduction of a tax on sugar.

Over the Great Recession UK households reduced real food expenditure. The authors show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour.

Random utility models are widely used to study consumer choice. The vast majority of applications make strong assumptions about the marginal utility of income, which restricts income effects, demand curvature and pass-through. The authors show that flexibly modeling income effects can be important, particularly if one is interested in the distributional effects of a policy change, even in a market in which, a priori, the expectation is that income effects will play a limited role. The authors allow for much more flexible forms of income effects than is common and illustrate the implications by simulating the introduction of an excise tax.

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. The authors document these changes, and consider how they affected the composition of households’ shopping baskets.

This study examines British households to assess how they have adjusted to changes in the economic environment.

We study the recent decline in dietary salt intake in the UK, and show that it was entirely attributable to product reformulation by firms.

We consider how influential corporate income taxes are in determining where firms choose to legally own intellectual property.