Olivier Allais

The Effects of a Fat Tax on French Households’ Purchases: A Nutritional Approach

This article assesses the effects of a “fat tax” on the nutrients purchased by French households across different income groups. This is done by making a preliminary estimation of price elasticities using a complete demand system on household scanner data, and by calculating nutrient elasticities using estimated price elasticities. We find that a fat tax has small and ambiguous effects on nutrients purchased by French households, and a slight effect on body weight in the short run, with a greater effect in the long run. Such a tax generates substantial tax revenue, but is highly regressive.

Solving and Simulating Models with Heterogeneous Agents and Aggregate Uncertainty

Although almost nonexistent 15 years ago, there are now numerous papers that analyze models with both aggregate uncertainty and a large number—typically a continuum—of heterogeneous agents. These models make it possible to study whether macroeconomic fluctuations affect different agents differently and whether heterogeneity in turn affects macroeconomic fluctuations. This chapter reviews different algorithms to solve and simulate these models. In addition, it highlights problems with popular accuracy tests and discusses more powerful alternatives.

Mandatory labels, taxes and market forces: An empirical evaluation of fat policies.

The public-health community views mandatory Front-of-Pack (FOP) nutrition labels and nutritional taxes as promising tools to control the growth of food-related chronic diseases. This paper uses household scanner data to propose an ex-ante evaluation and comparison of these two policy options for the fromage blanc and dessert yogurt market. In most markets, labelling is voluntary and firms display fat labels only on the FOP of low-fat products to target consumers who do not want to eat fat. We here separately identify consumer preferences for fat and for FOP fat labels by exploiting an exogenous difference in legal labelling requirements between these two product categories. Estimates of demand curves are combined with a supply model of oligopolistic price competition to simulate policies. We find that a feasible ad valorem fat tax dominates a mandatory FOP-label policy from an economic perspective, but both are equally effective in reducing average fat purchases.