Nano Barahona
Graduate Student Research Fellowship | 2018 - 2019 Academic Year
Food Labeling: Effects of Information on Nutrition and Health
In this research project Barahona asks whether large-scale policies aimed at shifting consumers’ preferences towards healthier products are cost-effective mechanisms to cope with increasing obesity rates in the context of a middle income country. In particular, he examines how the introduction of a nation-wide regulatory label based on the nutritional content of food products affects both the set of products purchased by consumers as well as the nutritional composition of food offered by companies, and its overall impact on health. Barahona does this in Chile, where in response to a growing obesity problem, the local legislature introduced a novel regulation in 2016 mandating food manufacturers to put warning labels on all of their packaged food products that surpassed an allowable level of calories, sodium, sugar, or fat.
Nano Barahona, Department of Economics
Hernán Barahona is a PhD student in economics at Stanford University. His main research interests lie in the fields of public economics, development economics, and industrial organization, with a special interest in evaluating government interventions and understanding the organizational structure of the state and its interactions with the private sector. He has worked on projects in Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. Barahona holds a BS in engineering and an MA in economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.