Lydia Ashton

Information about the food sources of foodborne illness provides the foundation for targeting interventions to prevent foodborne illness under the new Food Safety Modernization Act. Current foodborne illness source attribution estimates are based on outbreak investigations, yet outbreaks account for less than 5% of total foodborne illnesses in the U.S. Case control studies suggest that attribution estimates from outbreak data do not reflect the role of different foods in causing sporadic foodborne illnesses equally well for all pathogens. FoodNet active surveillance data captures sporadic illness, but historically has not directly linked these illnesses to foods. This study weds epidemiological and economics data and research methods to provide an entirely new approach to foodborne source attribution that focuses on sporadic foodborne illness and food consumption. The work is a collaboration between the CDC, the USDA Economic Research Service and the University of California, Berkel...

Using a novel laboratory experiment I find that hunger increases monetary impatience. This effect is larger when monetary rewards are immediate, which shows that present bias is a visceral response and can help explain why the poor tend to make more shortsighted economic decisions. Given possible confounds between physical and mental resource depletion, I also manipulated cognitive fatigue. I find that cognitive fatigue also increases monetary impatience; nevertheless this effect seems to be driven by a decrease in attention and an increase in heuristic-based choices. This suggests that hunger and cognitive fatigue affect time preferences through different mechanisms.

We use responses to a survey and experiment with participants in Mexico’s privatized social security system to examine how financial literacy impacts workers’ choice behavior and how simplifying information on management fees may increase measures of price elasticity sensitivity among the financially illiterate.

We find that by presenting fees in pesos instead of annual percentage rates, financially illiterate workers focus much more on fees when choosing between investment funds, selecting funds with lower average fees in hypothetical choice settings. Even though changes in information have small impacts on fees of the selected fund, holding fees constant, we show that changes in choice behavior imply a substantial
increase in price sensitivity. Hence, the way in which information is presented to workers can have a substantial impact on optimal fees that firms can charge in the marketplace.

Chetty et al. (2009) find that consumers perceive tax-salience as a price increase, i.e. sales decrease when posting tax-inclusive prices. Using data from their unique experiment, I test whether individuals display inattention to the decimal digits of the price (i.e. left-digit bias). I find a larger decrease in sales of products in which tax salience shifts the left-most digit upwards, even though the tax rate is the same for all products. This study presents new evidence on left-digit bias from a quasi-random experiment which also suggests that this is the main channel through which tax salience affects consumers’ decisions.