Chen Zhen, Georgia Athletic Association Professor in Food Choice, Obesity and Health Economics in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Georgia, will give the talk, "Introducing a Public-Use Food Price Database: With an Application to Estimating the Health Care Cost of Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption." The talk is scheduled for noon on Wednesday, April 16, in 157 Hosler Building at Penn State University Park.
In his talk, Zhen will discuss findings from a public-use food price database for retail food-at-home items. To illustrate the utility of this public-use price dataset, Zhen estimates the effect of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption on weight status and health care expenditures. Using data from the Center for Disease Control's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, he associates individual weight status and sugar-sweetened beverage intake frequency with local sugar-sweetened beverage cost. The health care cost of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is estimated by the contribution of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption to total obesity-related medical expenditures in the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a national data source measuring how Americans use and pay for medical care, health insurance, and out-of-pocket spending.
Zhen's research focuses on exploring the economic causes and consequences of food behavior, with a primary emphasis on behavior related to nutrition and health. He develops practical econometric methods for estimating flexible demand systems using household and retail scanner data. His recent research includes sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, panel price indices, shelf nutrition labels and SNAP households' food choices.
Zhen earned his bachelor's degree in economics from University of Colorado, his master's degree in applied economics from Montana State University and his doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University.
The Initiative for Energy and Environmental Economics and Policy (EEEPI) was established in 2011 with the goal of promoting policy-relevant economics research that lies at the boundary between economic sciences and the study of natural or engineered systems. The EEEPI initiative is focused primarily on the union between energy systems and environmental management and the development of quantitative tools to address decision challenges in these areas. View more information on EEEPI.
