Studies Concerning Spending Behavior of Households by Store Type and Income Level and Effects of Changes in Immigration Policy on State-Level WIC Participation Rates
Abstract
This dissertation is composed of three essays. The first essay examines how socio-demographic factors, spending habits, and characteristics of the retail food environment affect household expenditure across all food and beverage categories by store type. The second related essay goes a step further investigating household food and beverage expenditures not only by store type but also by income level. The outlets considered in this study are grocery stores, convenience stores, discount stores, club stores, drug stores, and dollar stores. The third essay evaluates the impact of policy regime change implemented by the Trump administration on state-level WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) program participation.
We employ a dynamic correlated random effect Tobit model in both essays. The source of data for this analysis is the Nielsen Homescan Panel over the period between 2011 and 2015. A differentiated feature of our empirical analysis relates to transforming the dependent variables which include zero observations using the inverse hyperbolic sine function. In the second essay, we form sub-samples by three categories of income levels (low, mid, and high-income level).
The results suggest that habitual spending behavior is undoubtedly a key factor in affecting nominal food and beverage expenditures across all store formats. This finding also holds across the three respective income sub-samples. Household income is not a statistically significant factor. However, household size, age, urbanization, education, race and ethnicity, region, time-invariant socio-demographic variables, indeed are drivers of household food and beverage expenditures at the six store outlets across the income categories.
For the third essay, we employ a Triple Difference estimator to investigate impact of immigration policy changes implemented by the Trump Administration on state-level WIC participation rates. We use Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement data (CPS-ASEC) provided by IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) in this analysis. We find that state-level WIC participation rates of Hispanic non-citizens are significantly lower after the immigration policy change implemented by the Trump administration. But this finding only holds for Hispanic non-citizens, not non-Hispanic non-citizens.
Citation
Lee, Keehyun (2021). Studies Concerning Spending Behavior of Households by Store Type and Income Level and Effects of Changes in Immigration Policy on State-Level WIC Participation Rates. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /195350.