The Impact of City-Level Beverage Taxes on Prices, Purchases, and Consumption
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Series
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Speaker(s)John Cawley (Cornell University, United States)
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FieldEmpirical Microeconomics
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LocationErasmus University, Polak Building, Room 2-04
Rotterdam -
Date and time
June 11, 2019
11:00 - 12:00
Abstract:
In the past ten years in the U.S., numerous cities have enacted taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), such as soda pop. In this presentation I describe the results of a multi-city project studying the effects of these taxes in three cities using store audits of prices, street intercept interviews, and phone surveys. The impact of the taxes on retail prices (i.e. the pass-through of the taxes), purchases, cross-border shopping (i.e. tax avoidance), and consumption will be described. These results help inform our understanding of such taxes, which have been recently implemented by dozens of countries around the world.