Studying the Child Obesity Epidemic With Natural Experiments

Robert Sandy (), Gilbert Liu, John Ottensmann, Rusty Tchernis, Jeffrey Wilson and O.T. Ford

No 14989, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We utilize clinical records of successive visits by children to pediatric clinics in Indianapolis to estimate the effects on their body mass of environmental changes near their homes. We compare results for fixed-residence children with those for cross-sectional data. Our environmental factors are fast food restaurants, supermarkets, parks, trails, and violent crimes, and 13 types of recreational amenities derived from the interpretation of annual aerial photographs. We looked for responses to these factors changing within buffers of 0.1, 0.25, 0.5, and 1 mile. We found that cross-sectional estimates are quite different from the Fixed Effects estimates of the impacts of amenities locating near a child. In cross section nearby fast food restaurants were associated with higher BMI and supermarkets with lower BMI. These results were reversed in the FE estimates. The recreational amenities that appear to lower children's BMI were fitness areas, kickball diamonds, and volleyball courts. We estimated that locating these amenities near their homes could reduce the weight of an overweight eight-year old boy by 3 to 6 pounds.

JEL-codes: I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Note: EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as Studying the Child Obesity Epidemic with Natural Experiments , Robert Sandy, Gilbert Liu, John Ottensmann, Rusty Tchernis, Jeff Wilson, O. T. Ford. in Economic Aspects of Obesity , Grossman and Mocan. 2011

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14989.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Chapter: Studying the Child Obesity Epidemic with Natural Experiments (2011)
Working Paper: Studying the Child Obesity Epidemic With Natural Experiments (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14989

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14989

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().