INTERVIEWER EFFECTS ON THE VALUATION OF GOODS WITH ETHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ATTRIBUTES

This paper investigates the impact of interviewer effects on willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. Face-to-face surveys were conducted with two interviewers. Both interviewers used a transcript and conducted the survey at the same location and at same time. We found that responses to the WTP questions differ across eco-labeled products and by interviewer. This interviewer effect is particularly relevant when we analyze the impact on WTP estimates for eco-labeled products grown in countries associated with the origin of one of the interviewers.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Assessing Affordability of Fruits and Vegetables in the Brazos Valley-Texas

The burden of obesity-related illness, which disproportionately affects low income households and historically disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups, is a leading public health issue in the United States. In addition, previous research has documented differences in eating behavior and dietary intake between racial and ethnic groups, as well as between urban and rural residents. The coexistence of diet-related disparities and diet-related health conditions has therefore become a major focus of research and policy. Researchers have hypothesized that differences in eating behavior originate from differing levels of access to and affordability of healthy food options, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Therefore, this dissertation examines the affordability of fresh produce in the Brazos Valley of Texas. This study uses information on produce prices collected by taking a census of food stores in a large regional area through the method ground-truthing. These are combined with responses to a contemporaneous health assessment survey. Key innovations include the construction of price indices based on economic theory, testing the robustness of results to different methods of price imputation, and employing spatial econometric techniques. In the first part of the analysis, I evaluate the socioeconomic and geographical factors associated with the affordability of fresh fruits and vegetables. The results based on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression show that except housing values (as median value of owner-occupied units) and store type, most factors do not have significant effects on the prices for these food items. In addition, the sizes and signs of the coefficients vary greatly across items. We found that consumers who pay higher premiums for fresh produce reside in rural areas and high proportion of minorities neighborhoods. We then assess how our results are influenced by different imputation methods to account for missing prices. The results reveal that the impacts of the factors used are similar regardless of the imputation methods. Finally we investigate the presence of spatial relationships between prices at particular stores and competing stores in the neighborhoods. The spatial estimation results based on Maximum Likelihood (ML) indicate a weak spatial correlation between the prices at stores located near each others in the neighborhoods. Stores selling vegetables display a certain level of spatial autocorrelation between the prices at a particular store and its neighboring competitors. Stores selling fruits do not present such relations in the prices

Socio-economic status, racial composition and the affordability of fresh fruits and vegetables in neighborhoods of a large rural region in Texas

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Little is known about how affordability of healthy food varies with community characteristics in rural settings. We examined how the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables varies with the economic and demographic characteristics in six rural counties of Texas.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Ground-truthed data from the Brazos Valley Food Environment Project were used to identify all food stores in the rural region and the availability and lowest price of fresh whole fruit and vegetables in the food stores. Socioeconomic characteristics were extracted from the 2000 U.S. Census Summary Files 3 at the level of the census block group. We used an imputation strategy to calculate two types of price indices for both fresh fruit and fresh vegetables: a <it>high variety </it>and a <it>basic </it>index; and evaluated the relationship between neighborhood economic and demographic characteristics and affordability of fresh produce, using linear regression models.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The mean cost of meeting the USDA recommendation of fruit consumption from a high variety basket of fruit types in our sample of stores was just over $27.50 per week. Relying on the three most common fruits lowered the weekly expense to under$17.25 per week, a reduction of 37.6%. The effect of moving from a high variety to a low variety basket was much less when considering vegetable consumption: a 4.3% decline from $29.23 to$27.97 per week. Univariate regression analysis revealed that the cost of fresh produce is not associated with the racial/ethnic composition of the local community. However, multivariate regression showed that holding median income constant, stores in neighborhoods with higher percentages of Black residents paid more for fresh fruits and vegetables. The proportion of Hispanic residents was not associated with cost in either the univariate or multivariate analysis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study extends prior work by examining the affordability of fresh fruit and vegetables from food stores in a large rural area; and how access to an affordable supply of fresh fruit and vegetables differs by neighborhood inequalities. The approach and findings of this study are relevant and have important research and policy implications for understanding access and availability of affordable, healthy foods.</p

INTERVIEWER EFFECTS ON THE VALUATION OF GOODS WITH ETHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ATTRIBUTES

This paper investigates the impact of interviewer effects on willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. Face-to-face surveys were conducted with two interviewers. Both interviewers used a transcript and conducted the survey at the same location and at same time. We found that responses to the WTP questions differ across eco-labeled products and by interviewer. This interviewer effect is particularly relevant when we analyze the impact on WTP estimates for eco-labeled products grown in countries associated with the origin of one of the interviewers