IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/aaea26/404584.html

Dining with Confidence: The Causal Effect of Food Safety Disclosure on Restaurant Compliance

Author

Listed:
  • Gurung, Suraj
  • Gao, Zhifeng
  • Chen, Lijun
  • Ward, Patrick
  • Magnier, Alexandre

Abstract

Detroit launched the mandatory phase of the Dining with Confidence (DwC) program on October 1, 2024, requiring licensed food service establishments to display color-coded compliance placards based on inspection outcomes. This study estimates the short-run effect of DwC on restaurant inspection outcomes using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) framework. Detroit inspection records were obtained from the Detroit Open Data portal, while records for comparison counties were collected from publicly accessible county inspection databases using custom webscraping scripts. After harmonizing county-specific records, the analysis uses all inspection types and constructs a balanced municipality-quarter panel with Detroit as the treated unit and 37 donor municipalities. The main SDID estimate indicates a reduction of 0.369 total violations per inspection after the mandatory rollout (SE = 0.176). Sensitivity checks generally produce negative but less precise estimates. The findings provide preliminary evidence that DwC was associated with lower observed violations during the first four post-treatment quarters.

Suggested Citation

  • Gurung, Suraj & Gao, Zhifeng & Chen, Lijun & Ward, Patrick & Magnier, Alexandre, 2026. "Dining with Confidence: The Causal Effect of Food Safety Disclosure on Restaurant Compliance," 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri 404584, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    • Handle: RePEc:ags:aaea26:404584
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.404584
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/404584/files/177576_199134_115232_AAEA_DWC_2026.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.404584?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:aaea26:404584. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaeaaea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.