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Revisiting the Income Effect: Gasoline Prices and Grocery Purchases

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Author Info
Dora Gicheva
Justine Hastings
Sofia Villas-Boas

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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 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13614.

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Date of creation: Nov 2007
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13614

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E21 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Consumption; Saving; Wealth
E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
L10 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - General
L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure
L81 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce

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Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  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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