Dining with Confidence: The Causal Effect of Food Safety Disclosure on Restaurant Compliance

Suraj Gurung, Zhifeng Gao, Lijun Chen, Patrick Ward and Alexandre Magnier

No 404584, 2026 Annual Meeting, July 26 - 28, 2026, Kansas City, Missouri from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Detroit launched the mandatory phase of the Dining with Confidence (DwC) program on October 1, 2024, requiring licensed food service establishments to display color-coded compliance placards based on inspection outcomes. This study estimates the short-run effect of DwC on restaurant inspection outcomes using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) framework. Detroit inspection records were obtained from the Detroit Open Data portal, while records for comparison counties were collected from publicly accessible county inspection databases using custom webscraping scripts. After harmonizing county-specific records, the analysis uses all inspection types and constructs a balanced municipality-quarter panel with Detroit as the treated unit and 37 donor municipalities. The main SDID estimate indicates a reduction of 0.369 total violations per inspection after the mandatory rollout (SE = 0.176). Sensitivity checks generally produce negative but less precise estimates. The findings provide preliminary evidence that DwC was associated with lower observed violations during the first four post-treatment quarters.

Keywords: Food; Consumption/Nutrition/Food; Safety (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 12
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea26:404584

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.404584

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