Calorie posting at chain restaurants
Apologies for thin posting. It's just been too busy for much posting given this blog is pretty low on my priority list these days. I do have a number of on-topic things I'd like to blog about and hope to have a bit more time in the weeks ahead. Today was my last lecture for a long time, and that helps a lot. Just finals, a PhD prelim exam, research and a ridiculous stack of referee reports due.... Anyway. Here's some new interesting research by Bryan Bollinger, Phillip Leslie and Alan Sorensen on mandatory calorie posting in restaurants. Here's the abstract: We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers’ purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers’ food choices—there is almost no change in purchases of beverage calories. There is no impact on Starbucks profit on average, and for the subset of stores located close t