Professor Dame Rachel Griffith

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.

Design of optimal corrective taxes in the alcohol market

We want to understand how important market frictions are in stifling the transmission of ideas from one firm to another. 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.

We present a method to estimate preferences in the presence of unobserved choice set heterogeneity.

The rise in obesity has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption. We show that official government household survey data indicate that calories have declined in England between 1980 and 2013; while there has been an increase in calories from food out at restaurants, fast food, soft drinks and confectionery, overall there has been a decrease in total calories purchased.

We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.

The Importance of Product Reformulation Versus Consumer Choice in Improving Diet Quality

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.