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Over the Great Recession UK households reduced real food expenditure. We show that they were able to maintain the number of calories that they purchased, and the nutritional quality of these calories, by adjusting their shopping behaviour. We document the mechanisms that households used. We motivate our analysis with a model of shopping behaviour in which households adjust shopping effort and the characteristics of their shopping basket in response to economic shocks. We use detailed longitudinal data and focus on within household changes in basket characteristics and proxies for shopping effort.
Authors
CPP Co-Director, IFS Research Director
Rachel is Research Director and Professor at the University of Manchester. She was made a Dame for services to economic policy and education in 2021.
Research Fellow University of Wisconsin
Martin, previously Deputy Research Director, is a Research Fellow at IFS and Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin.
Research Fellow London School of Economics
Kate is an IFS Research Fellow and an Assistant Professor at LSE, interested in public finance, industrial organisation and applied microeconomics.
Working Paper details
- DOI
- 10.1920/wp.ifs.2015.1529
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
R, Griffith and M, O'Connell and K, Smith. (2015). Shopping around: how households adjusted food spending over the Great Recession. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/shopping-around-how-households-adjusted-food-spending-over-great-recession-0 (accessed: 28 March 2024).
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