Solitary drinkers in Great Britain: How do their sociodemographic characteristics, consumption patterns, and drinking occasions differ from those who drink with others?

Objective: Inequalities in alcohol-related harm may arise partly from differences in drinking practices between population groups. One under-researched practice associated with harm is consuming alcohol alone. We identify sociodemographic characteristics associated with drinking alone and the occasion-level characteristics associated with occasions when people drink alone.

Geographical differences in the financial impacts of different forms of tobacco licence fees on small retailers in Scotland.

Objective: Retailer licencing fees are a promising avenue to regulate tobacco availability. However, they face strong opposition from retailers and the tobacco industry, who argue significant financial impacts. This study compares the impacts of different forms of tobacco licence schemes on retailers' profits in Scotland.

Does cutting down on your food consumption lead to a net improvement in nutritional intake? A panel data approach using data from the UK Biobank.

Background: Food diets are complex and a policy targeting one item of a person's diet does not affect their nutritional intake in a solely additive or subtractive manner. Policies tackling unhealthy diets are more likely to be adopted by governments if there is robust evidence to support them. To evaluate dietary policies, it is important to understand the correlations and interdependencies between food groups, as these can lead to unintended negative consequences.

Estimation of integrated price elasticities for alcohol and tobacco in the United Kingdom using the living costs and food survey 2006-2017.

Introduction: Evidence shows that price is an important policy lever in reducing consumption of alcohol and tobacco. However, there is little evidence of the cross-price effect between alcohol and tobacco.

Methods: This paper uses an econometric model which estimates participation and consumption elasticities, on data from the UK Living Costs and Food Survey 2006-2017 and extends the literature by, for the first time, estimating joint price elasticities for disaggregated alcohol and tobacco products.

The impact of increasing the United Kingdom national minimum wage on self-reported health.

There is a growing but mixed literature on the health effects of minimum wages. If minimum wage changes have a statistically significant impact on health, this suggests health effects should be incorporated into cost-benefit analyses to capture wider policy impacts. Whilst most existing UK based literature examines the introduction of a minimum wage, this paper exploits the 2016, 2017 and 2018 UK National Minimum Wage (NMW) increases as natural experiments using a series of difference-in-differences models.

Do dual purchasers behave differently? An analysis of purchasing data for households that buy both alcohol and tobacco in the United Kingdom.

Background And Aims: Dual purchasers of alcohol and tobacco are at increased health risk from the interacting health impacts of alcohol and tobacco use. They are also at financial risk from exposure to the dual financial cost of policies that increase alcohol and tobacco prices. Understanding whose alcohol and tobacco use exposes them to these health and financial risks is important for understanding the inequality impacts of control policies.

The effect of alcohol tax changes on retail prices: how do on-trade alcohol retailers pass through tax changes to consumers?

The effectiveness of alcohol duty increases relies on alcohol retailers passing the tax increase on to consumers. This study uses sales data from a market research company to investigate tax pass-through over 11 years for on-premise retailers in England and whether this varies across the price distribution, for different beverage categories and outlet types. Panel data quantile regression analysis is used to estimate the impact of 12 excise duty changes and 3 sales tax changes between 2007 and 2017 on prices.

Quantile regression of tobacco tax pass-through in the UK 2013-2019. How have manufacturers passed through tax changes for different tobacco products?

Background: The effectiveness of tax increases relies heavily on the tobacco industry passing on such increases to smokers (also referred to as 'pass-through'). Previous research has found heterogeneous levels of tax pass-through across the market segments of tobacco products available to smokers. This study uses retail sales data to assess the extent to which recent tax changes have been passed on to smokers and whether this varies across the price distribution.