Chen Zhen, PhD, UGA Athletic Association Professor in Food Choice, Obesity and Health Economics in the at the University of Georgia, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Introducing a Public-Use Food Price Database: With an Application to Estimating the Health Care Cost of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption” on April 16, 2025.
Abstract:
Zhen introduces a public-use food price database for retail food-at-home items. Circana retail scanner data provide sales information that is used to calculate monthly county price indexes from 2008 to 2020. He index food costs at the 4-digit What We Eat in American (WWEIA) category or more disaggregated levels. The cost of each food category is measured by the panel rolling-window (RW) Gini-Eltetö-Köves-Szulc (GEKS) and Caves-Christensen-Diewert (CCD) indexes. Both are free of time-series chain drift and are spatially transitive. In the first release (Release 1.0), he provides indexes for 34 beverage categories. To illustrate the utility of this public-use price dataset, he estimates the effect of sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption on weight status and health care expenditure. Using the public-use 2011-2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data, he associates individual weight status and SSB intake frequency with local SSB cost. The health care cost of SSB consumption is estimated by the contribution of SSB consumption to total obesity-related medical expenditures in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
Bio:
Chen Zhen is the UGA Athletic Association Professor in Food Choice, Obesity and Health Economics, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Georgia. His research focuses on exploring the economic causes and consequences of food behavior, with a primary emphasis on behavior related to nutrition and health. He develops practical econometric methods for estimating flexible demand systems using household and retail scanner data. His recent research includes sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, panel price indices, shelf nutrition labels, and SNAP households’ food choices.