Love scenes and garden plots: form and femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and her German garden (1898)

This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden that I Love (1894). The Garden that I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat

Sin taxes in differentiated product oligopoly: an application to the butter and margarine market

There is policy interest in using tax to change food purchasing behaviour. The literature has not accounted for the oligopolistic structure of the industry. In oligopoly the impact of taxes depend on preferences, and how firms pass tax onto prices. We consider a tax on saturated fat. Using transaction level data we find that the form of tax and firms' strategic behaviour are important determinants of the impact. Our results suggest that an excise tax is more efficient than an ad valorem tax at reducing saturated fat purchases and an ad valorem tax is more efficient at raising revenue.

The Effects of Banning Advertising on Demand, Supply and Welfare: Structural Estimation on a Junk Food Market

Restricting advertising is one way governments seek to reduce consumption of potentially harmful goods. There have been increasing calls to apply a similar policy to the junk food market. The effect will depend on how brand advertising influences consumer demand, and on the strategic pricing response of oligopolistic firms. We develop a model of consumer demand and dynamic oligopoly supply in which multi-product firms compete in prices and advertising budgets. We model the impact of advertising on demand in a exible way, that allows for the possibility that advertising is predatory or cooperative, and we consider how market equilibria would be impacted by an advertising ban. In our application we apply the model to the potato chip market using transaction level data. The implications of an advertising ban for consumer welfare depend on the view one takes about advertising. In the potato chip market advertising has little informational content. The advertising may be a characteristic valued by consumers, or it may act to distort decision-making. We quantify the welfare impacts of an advertising ban under alternative views of advertising, and show that welfare conclusions depend on which view of advertising the policymaker adopts

The effects of banning advertising in junk food markets

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market { the potato chips market. We exploit consumer level exposure to adverts to estimate demand, allowing advertising to potentially shift the weight consumers place on product healthiness, tilt demand curves, have dynamic effects and spillover effects across brands. We simulate the impact of a ban and show that the potential health benefits are partially offset by firms lowering prices and by consumer switching to other junk foods

The effects of banning advertising in junk food markets

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market { the potato chips market. We exploit consumer level exposure to adverts to estimate demand, allowing advertising to potentially shift the weight consumers place on product healthiness, tilt demand curves, have dynamic effects and spillover effects across brands. We simulate the impact of a ban and show that the potential health benefits are partially offset by firms lowering prices and by consumer switching to other junk foods

The Effects of Banning Advertising on Demand, Supply and Welfare: Structural Estimation on a Junk Food Market

Restricting advertising is one way governments seek to reduce consumption of potentially harmful goods. There have been increasing calls to apply a similar policy to the junk food market. The effect will depend on how brand advertising influences consumer demand, and on the strategic pricing response of oligopolistic firms. We develop a model of consumer demand and dynamic oligopoly supply in which multi-product firms compete in prices and advertising budgets. We model the impact of advertising on demand in a exible way, that allows for the possibility that advertising is predatory or cooperative, and we consider how market equilibria would be impacted by an advertising ban. In our application we apply the model to the potato chip market using transaction level data. The implications of an advertising ban for consumer welfare depend on the view one takes about advertising. In the potato chip market advertising has little informational content. The advertising may be a characteristic valued by consumers, or it may act to distort decision-making. We quantify the welfare impacts of an advertising ban under alternative views of advertising, and show that welfare conclusions depend on which view of advertising the policymaker adopts

The effects of banning advertising in junk food markets

There are growing calls to restrict advertising of junk foods. Whether such a move will improve diet quality will depend on how advertising shifts consumer demands and how firms respond. We study an important and typical junk food market { the potato chips market. We exploit consumer level exposure to adverts to estimate demand, allowing advertising to potentially shift the weight consumers place on product healthiness, tilt demand curves, have dynamic effects and spillover effects across brands. We simulate the impact of a ban and show that the potential health benefits are partially offset by firms lowering prices and by consumer switching to other junk foods

How well targeted are soda taxes?

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. Policymakers highlight the young, particularly from poor backgrounds, and high sugar consumers as groups whose behavior they would most like to influence. There are also concerns about the policy being regressive. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities

“A Difficult Symbol for Women”: The garden book and the garden as retreat in the works of Rosamund Marriott Watson

This essay considers how the Aesthete and poet, Rosamund Marriott Watson, explores the idea of the garden as retreat – a treacherously doubled symbol for women, both liberating and confining. In Marriott Watson’s 1891 poetry collection A Summer Night, the garden retreat channels the transgressive energies of the 1890s, sheltering but continuous with the city, fostering the creative, sexually emancipated New Woman. By contrast, in her later garden book The Heart of a Garden (1906), Marriott Watson draws on the idea of the garden as retreat in order to present a valorization of insularity and withdrawal into domesticity. This essay reads this change in garden ethos in relation to Marriott Watson’s own career and also in terms of the conventions of the garden book (a little known genre that was popular at the turn of the nineteenth century). While the garden book has been read as feminist by recent critics, the example of The Heart of a Garden reveals that, like the garden, the garden book carries double and ambivalent meanings. The essay closes by exploring the ways in which we can read Marriott Watson’s garden writing, simultaneously, as a set of reflections on life in the suburbs, another site that conceived, within the Victorian imagination, as a space of retreat