Working Paper: NBER ID: w11879
Authors: Shinyi Chou; Inas Rashad; Michael Grossman
Abstract: Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents being overweight. The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week. Our results indicate that a ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 10 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 12 percent. The elimination of the tax deductibility of this type of advertising would produce smaller declines of between 3 and 5 percent in these outcomes but would impose lower costs on children and adults who consume fast food in moderation because positive information about restaurants that supply this type of food would not be banned completely from television.
Keywords: childhood obesity; fastfood advertising; television advertising; public health policy
JEL Codes: I10; I12
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| fastfood advertising (M38) | body mass index (BMI) (I14) |
| fastfood advertising (M38) | probability of being overweight (C46) |
| ban on fastfood advertising (M38) | number of overweight children aged 3 to 11 (Y10) |
| ban on fastfood advertising (M38) | number of overweight adolescents aged 12 to 18 (I10) |
| eliminating tax deductibility of fastfood advertising (H20) | prevalence of overweight children (I30) |
| eliminating tax deductibility of fastfood advertising (H20) | prevalence of overweight adolescents (I10) |
| increasing exposure to fastfood advertising by half an hour (D18) | boy's BMI (Y10) |
| increasing exposure to fastfood advertising by half an hour (D18) | girl's BMI (J16) |