If you want information on how increased income due to UBI would affect people’s spending on food, you can look at the data that we already have on the relationship between income and spending on food. Three stylizedfacts:
As income goes up, the proportion of income spent on food goes down.
As income goes up, the total amount of money spent on food goes up.
As income goes up, the proportion of one’s food budget spent on restaurants goes up.
These trends generally hold if you are comparing different countries with each other, or if you are comparing different people within a single country, or if you are looking at a single country over time as it gets richer. I don’t see any strong reasons to think that they wouldn’t also apply to people whose income went up due to receiving a new UBI.
So if a household was making $20,000 per year and spending 20% of it ($4,000) on food, and UBI increases their income to $25,000 per year, then we can predict that they will spend somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 per year on food, and some of the increased spending will go towards increased quality & convenience (such as eating out). You could probably make more precise predictions if you tried to put numbers on the three stylized facts.
More generally, the model here is: UBI affects the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’, and the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’ affects other things like prices & spending habits. So if you want to predict how UBI will affect something like prices, then study how ‘income after taxes & transfers’ affects prices, and combine that with your estimate of how the UBI will affect the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’.
If you want information on how increased income due to UBI would affect people’s spending on food, you can look at the data that we already have on the relationship between income and spending on food. Three stylized facts:
As income goes up, the proportion of income spent on food goes down.
As income goes up, the total amount of money spent on food goes up.
As income goes up, the proportion of one’s food budget spent on restaurants goes up.
These trends generally hold if you are comparing different countries with each other, or if you are comparing different people within a single country, or if you are looking at a single country over time as it gets richer. I don’t see any strong reasons to think that they wouldn’t also apply to people whose income went up due to receiving a new UBI.
So if a household was making $20,000 per year and spending 20% of it ($4,000) on food, and UBI increases their income to $25,000 per year, then we can predict that they will spend somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000 per year on food, and some of the increased spending will go towards increased quality & convenience (such as eating out). You could probably make more precise predictions if you tried to put numbers on the three stylized facts.
More generally, the model here is: UBI affects the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’, and the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’ affects other things like prices & spending habits. So if you want to predict how UBI will affect something like prices, then study how ‘income after taxes & transfers’ affects prices, and combine that with your estimate of how the UBI will affect the distribution of ‘income after taxes & transfers’.