October 17, 2024

Congratulations to Yuxuan Pan, a Northeast Center research assistant, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation in Agricultural Economics on October 7, 2024! Pan’s dissertation explores the impacts of COVID-19 on mental health, disparities in nutritional quality, and the effects of soda taxes on household purchases. Pan will be joining the University of Kentucky as a postdoctoral researcher in December. She will continue providing research support to NERCRD through November.

Dissertation Title:
Three essays on Mental Health, Racial Disparity, and Consumer Behavior

Dissertation Abstract:
This dissertation explores the impacts of COVID-19 on mental health, disparities in nutritional quality, and the effects of soda taxes on household purchases and comprises three chapters titled: 

• Economic Shocks, Food Insufficiency, and Mental Health: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic; 
• COVID-19 and Racial Disparities in the Nutritional Quality of Food-at-home Purchases; and 
• The Effect of State Soda Taxes on Soft Drink and Candy Purchases.

The first chapter addresses three specific questions: how did unemployment, income loss and food insufficiency induced by Covid-19 affect mental health? Which predictor is the most important? In addition, which subgroups were hit hardest by the hardships induced by Covid-19 and experienced more mental health disorders (i.e., anxiety)? Using Household Pulse Survey data from the Census Bureau, we find the pandemic significantly impacted both food sufficiency and mental health, with food insufficiency having a larger negative impact on mental health than income loss. Unemployment was associated with better mental health, possibly due to reduced fear of exposure to COVID at the place of work. These findings were confirmed in a sensitivity analysis. We also discover heterogeneous effects of food insufficiency, unemployment, and income loss on mental health across different socioeconomic groups. Larger effects were found in mortgage paying-households, among males, and in non-metro areas. These results indicate the need for effective and timely policies targeting disadvantaged groups to maintain or improve their mental well-being, as well as food sufficiency, during future economic crises and public health emergencies.

The second chapter explores the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on the nutritional quality of food-at-home purchases of different racial groups in the U.S. Using a fixed effects regression model and Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions we find that, in the first two months of COVID-19, the black-white gap in the normalized Healthy Eating Index (HEI) shrank by 0.03 standard deviations or by 50% of the pre-COVID black-white gap. In contrast, the Hispanic-white gap widened by 0.024 standard deviations in June 2020. According to our results these differences were largely due to demographics, income, and education. Households headed by non-married black individuals purchased less healthful foods than their white counterparts. Larger household sizes contributed to less healthful food purchases for Hispanic households compared to whites. Higher incomes in Asian compared to white households accounted for 26% of the Asian-white gap. Geographical differences in exposure to COVID-19 and related policies also contributed to disparities, but to a lesser degree. Our findings also indicate that COVID-19 affected racial disparity in nutritional quality to a lesser extent compared to the Great Recession.

The third chapter provides the first estimates of the impact of soda sales taxes, which are commonly levied in U.S. states, on the substitution between soft drink and candy purchases. We use Nielsen Consumer Panel data at the household level to analyze changes in soft drink and candy purchases resulting from Ohio’s tax increase in 2013. We find that the tax change decreased household purchases of soft drinks by 1.7 ounces per week, representing a 4% decrease relative to the pretax mean of the treatment group households. Households in Ohio increased their candy purchases by 0.26 ounces (an 8% increase relative to the baseline) following the tax change. Furthermore, we find that households without obese or diabetic members are more tax-sensitive regarding soft drink purchases than those with obese or diabetic members.