Risk, time, and diet quality: Evidence from a general population survey

This paper explores the relationships between overall diet quality and attitudes toward risk and time using a general population survey. We combine a food frequency questionnaire and a choice-based preference module to elicit individual risk and time preferences. The online questionnaire was administered to a socioeconomic panel representative of the French population. We show that risk and time preferences are associated with individual heterogeneity in key aspects of diet quality, a result that holds across a wide range of robustness checks. Using a hierarchical Bayes framework, we jointly estimate individual risk aversion and impatience parameters and show that associations hold for both model-free and structural estimates of risk and time preferences. We further show that these associations account for a substantial share of the heterogeneity in dietary outcomes beyond sociodemographic controls. Risk and time preferences contribute to both the income-diet-quality and education-diet-quality gradients, but in opposite directions, resulting in a limited net contribution to explaining socioeconomic inequalities in diet quality.