Ensaios em microeconomia aplicada: avaliação de impacto do programa Crescer Saudável no enfrentamento à obesidade infantil e desempenho e ações estratégicas das empresas de food service em plataformas virtuais

Abstract

This thesis presents two independent essays in the area of applied microeconomics. The first essay assesses the strategies of the Healthy Growth Program in tackling childhood obesity. For this purpose, longitudinal information from Brazilian municipalities that joined or not joined the program was used during the 2016-2018 period. The applied methodology consisted of estimating the model of differences in differences with fixed effects. In addition, robustness tests were carried out in order to prove the significance of the main results, about the treatment on the result variable. The empirical findings confirm the hypothesis that the municipalities that adhered to the Healthy Growth Program showed a reduction in the proportion of children in situations of overweight, obesity and severe obesity. And the robustness tests validated the adopted empirical strategy. Finally, a cost-effectiveness ratio analysis was built, the results show that the average cost-effectiveness per child saved from obesity is less than the cost of hospital admissions. The second essay analyzes how the food service market strategic variables can influence the performance of companies operating in the delivery market. Additionally, we will test the hypothesis of temporal persistence of the response variable. That said, longitudinal data from companies that operated in the food service market during the period of 2019 were used, based on monthly data from Mvarandas, with data models in static and dynamic panels. The results suggest that the strategic variables, namely: price, price dispersion, product diversification and average expenses are correlated with the turnover of companies with delivery. The empirical findings show that the higher the price level and average consumer expenditure per establishment, the higher the company’s turnover. On the other hand, higher levels of product concentration pointed to a negative correlation with sales. These findings corroborate the literature on the strategies used in the monopolistic competition market, which is the case of online food service companies. In these perspectives, these findings suggest that product and price differentiation strategies are indispensable to leverage the company’s market power and, consequently, maximize its sales / revenue. In other words, the greater the level of differentiation of the company’s products, the greater its market power, and consequently, the greater the willingness to pay of its customers and the performance of the textit food service company in the market. delivery.