Demand for food in the United States

Abigail Mary Okrent

"Many findings and policy recommendations in the academic literature are influenced by published estimates of elasticities of demand for food. However, the quality of these estimates is diverse and depends on modeling choices and assumptions, including the functional form for demands, types of data used, separability structure, food definitions, and statistical techniques used to estimate the models. In this monograph, we make three contributions to the empirical literature on demand for food in the United States. First, we evaluate the elasticities of demand for food from previous studies using the mean absolute error in elasticity-based predictions of quantity responses to actual past changes in prices and total expenditure. Second, we estimate elasticities of demand for aggregate food products using annual and monthly data under various alternative assumptions about functional...