Recovering the shadow value of nutrients

This article investigates the shadow values of twenty-eight different nutrients. It links the unit price of foods to the shadow values of nutrients by building on a utility theoretic model first proposed by Gorman. Maximum entropy principles are then used to reason consistently about the values of the parameters of interest. The resulting estimates are discussed and analyzed

Information theoretic measures of the income distribution in food demand

A new method to nest, estimate and test the rank and functional form of the income terms in an incomplete system of demand equations is developed. Information theory is employed to infer the U.S. income distribution from data on quintile and top five percentile income ranges and intra-quintile and top five percentile mean incomes. Maximum entropy income distributions are combined with data on the U.S. demand for 21 food items to estimate U.S. food demand over the period 1919–1995, excluding 1942–1946