The Implications of Food Taxation

This study examines the effect of taxing food in the state sales tax base. Comparing sales in counties that share a border but that tax food at different allows for estimation of the tax sensitivity of food purchases. Exploiting additional repeals at the state level allows for the potential identification based on changes to the tax base, which facilitates comparison of consumer responses to sales tax rate and tax base changes.
The data comes from the Nielsen Retail Scanner from 2006-2016 which contains weekly pricing, volume, and store environment information from 90 retail chains across all US market.

The size of the data is roughly 1.8 TB per year for approximately 20 TB total.

R and STATA will be used for data manipulation and regression analysis.

Kenneth Tester PhD Student in Economics
David Agrawal, Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Policy

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