Weekly Departmental Seminar- Environmental Economics and Management

Date: 21.11.2021

Speaker: Eve Colson-Sihra

Affiliation: Hebrew University

Bio: Eve Colson-Sihra (PhD,Sciences Po Paris) is Junior Lecturer at the Department of Economics and thePPE Program, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem. She specializes in applied microeconomics, behavioral and cultural economics.

Her research aims at measuring the impact of cultural and social incentives on consumer behavior. Eve has paid particular attention to consumption patterns of poor households in India, identifying the trade-off they face between adequate nutrition and social status. Her other works study the effect of identity on consumption (How Do We Choose Our Identity?

A Revealed Preference Approach Using Food Consumption, Journal of Political Economy 2021), and how trade integration homogenizes food tastes.

 Subject: “Market Integration and Cultural Change in Consumption”

Abstract: This paper examines the convergence of consumption patterns over time using detailed household surveys on food purchases in France for 1974 and 2005.We first document that geographically closer regions are more similar in their food tastes. Second, we find that this spatial pattern decreased during thirty years of deep market integration. Relying on a structural demand estimation, we show that the decrease in distance decay is not fully explained by changes in the economic environment. Moreover, we find evidence that taste diversity in2005 strongly correlates with other cultural traits.

The Seminar meeting will take place on Sunday,at 13:15pm – 14:30pm, at the Agricultural Economics Seminar Room, Volcani Building, floor 1.