케모포비아의 경제적 효과 추정 - 생리대 유해물질 파동에 대한 사례분석 -

초록

The 2017 sanitary pad controversy over toxic chemicals in South Korea began with a press release regarding experimental results showing that volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carcinogens, were detected in several sanitary pad, but it eventually turned out to be harmless to human body according to the announcement of the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. In this paper, we investigate the economic effects of chemophobia caused by the incident. To do this, we constructed a unique dateset by matching Nielson sales data with firm-level financial data from Korea Enterprice Data (KED). Then, we employed the difference-in- difference method by treating sanitary market as treatment group and diaper market as control group. First, our results show that both sales revenues and volumes of the sanitary pads under investigation significantly decreased after the incident. On the contrary, overall sales revenues increased after the incident, but volumes barely changed. Second, we also find that sales revenues and volumes of relatively expensive products like premium and organic sanitary pad increased after the incident but those of normal products did not change. Overall, these results indicated that the consumers responded to chemophobia by diversifying their consumption rather than reducing consumption, which implying significant economic costs

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