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Abstract
Lack of access to nutritious and affordable food has become an important public policy
issue in the U.S.: various interest groups are seeking to reverse a trend whereby certain areas lack
larger, full-service grocery stores that provide “higher” quality foods. Based on game-theoretic
findings suggesting that lack of food access can be an equilibrium outcome, we specify a model
relating access to higher quality food stores to a vector of supply and demand factors, using
seven years of county-level data for the contiguous U.S., and a constrained generalized ordered
logit estimator. Our results suggest that demand side factors, especially market size (total income
and SNAP funds) play an important role in determining food access, and that large food stores
avoid areas with higher poverty. Some cost determinants, such as the ratio of building costs to
the total site cost, home price index (for counties with higher poverty rates than the average) and
ease of recruiting labor, affect the probability of observing areas with no access. A more
favorable business tax regime has no impact on access, while better transportation infrastructure
reduces rather than improves food access. Our results shed new light on the determinants of
food access in addition to highlighting what policy can and cannot accomplish to improve food
access.