​Street vendors, incentives and self-regulation: a field study in urban India, with D. Tommasi and S. Mookerjee, Review of Economics and Statistics 2020

Kolkata team picture

The street food market is a major source of food in developing countries, but is often characterized by unsafe food conditions.

We investigate whether improvements in food safety can be achieved by providing information to vendors in the form of a training.

Among randomly assigned groups of streetfood vendors in Kolkata, India, we find large improvements in knowledge and awareness, but little change in their observed behavior.

We provide suggestive evidence that a combination of both lack of demand for food safety and perceived high costs of hygienic practices for vendors, are likely to drive the results. We conclude that information is not the key constraint in this context.

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Presentations: ​

• 2018-2019: University of Rochester (US); NEUDC Cornell University (US); Binghamton University (US); International University of Japan; Boston College (US); Monash University (AUS); University of Copenhagen (DK); University of Nottingham (UK)
• Royal Economy Society Annual Conference 2019 (Warwick, UK); Canadian Econometric Society Annual Conference (Banff, 2019); North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (University of Washington, Seattle, 2019)
• 2013-2014: University of Namur (BE); Paris School of Economics (FR); Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE); Université libre de Bruxelles – ECARES (BE)

Media:

• Hindustan Times (IND)