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Revisiting the Income Effect: Gasoline Prices and Grocery Purchases

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Author Info
Dora Gicheva (Yale University)
Justine Hastings (Yale University)
Sofia Villas-Boas (University of California, Berkeley)

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Abstract

This paper examines the importance of income effects in purchase decisions for every-day products by analyzing the effect of gasoline prices on grocery expenditures. Using detailed scanner data from a large grocery chain as well as data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES), we show that consumers re-allocate their expenditures across and within food-consumption categories in order to offset necessary increases in gasoline expenditures when gasoline prices rise. We show that gasoline expenditures rise one-for-one with gasoline prices, consumers substitute away from food-away-from-home and towards groceries in order to partially offset their increased expenditures on gasoline, and that within grocery category, consumers substitute away from regular shelf-price products and towards promotional items in order to save money on overall grocery expenditures. On average, consumers are able to decrease the net price paid per grocery item by 5-11% in response to a 100% increase in gasoline prices. Our results show that consumers respond to permanent changes in income from gasoline prices by substituting towards lower-cost food at the grocery store and lower priced items within grocery category. The substitution away from full-priced items towards sale items has implications for microeconomic discrete-choice demand models as well as for macroeconomic inflation measures that typically do not incorporate frequently changing promotional prices.

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Paper provided by Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley in its series Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series with number 1044R.

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Date of creation: 01 Nov 2007
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Handle: RePEc:cdl:agrebk:1044r

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  1. Erika Spissu & Abdul Pinjari & Ram Pendyala & Chandra Bhat, 2009. "A copula-based joint multinomial discrete–continuous model of vehicle type choice and miles of travel," Transportation, Springer, vol. 36(4), pages 403-422, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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