This repository contains replication materials for The Effect of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxes in the United States: Evidence from Scanner Data by J. Orchard and Z. Goodman.
In this paper we estimate the effect of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage (SSB) taxes in the United States on sugar consumption. In particular, we use data from the Nielsen Consumer Panel merged with nutrition data to observe quantities of micronutrients purchased by households during a mutli-year span when several localities passed SSB taxes:
- Feb. 2015: Berkeley, CA - 1 cent per ounce
- Jan. 2017: Philadelphia, PA - 1.5 cents per ounce
- Apr. 2017: Albany, CA - 1 cent per ounce
- Jul. 2017: Boulder, CO - 2 cents per ounce
- Jul. 2017: Oakland, CA - 1 cent per ounce
- Aug. 2017 - Dec. 2017: Cook County, IL - 1 cent per ounce
- Jan. 2018: San Francisco, CA: 1 cent per ounce
- Jan. 2018: Seattle, WA: 1.75 cents per ounce
- Taxes significantly decrease sugar purchased in taxed localities
- However, households often shop outside taxed localities, and levying the taxes significantly increases cross-border shopping
- Net sugar purchases at the household level decline modestly relative to the counterfactual
We are unable to post the data used because of privacy restrictions. However, the repository contains the output from our Jupyter Notebooks.