Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality*

TLDR

The study investigates why wealthier Americans consume healthier foods than poorer Americans, aiming to identify the causes of nutritional inequality. The authors estimate a structural grocery‑demand model using an instrument based on grocery chain presence and product‑group comparative advantages across markets. They find that neighborhood grocery access does not meaningfully explain nutritional inequality, and that equalizing product availability and prices would reduce it by only about 10%, implying that 90% of the gap is driven by demand differences and that expanding healthy grocery supply would not substantially reduce inequality.

Abstract

Abstract We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments contribute meaningfully to nutritional inequality. We then estimate a structural model of grocery demand, using a new instrument exploiting the combination of grocery retail chains’ differing presence across geographic markets with their differing comparative advantages across product groups. Counterfactual simulations show that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available to high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%, while the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand. These findings counter the argument that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality.