NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

# NBER Publications by Marco Sunder

## Working Papers and Chapters

 March 2008 The Transition to Post-industrial BMI Values Among US Children with John Komlos, Ariane Breitfelder: w13898 In our opinion, the trend in the BMI values of US children has not been estimated accurately. We use five models to estimate the BMI trends of non-Hispanic US-born black and white children and adolescents ages 2-19 born 1941-2006 on the basis of all NHES and NHANES data sets. We also use some historical BMI values for comparison. The increase in BMIZ values during the period considered was on average 1.3sigma (95% CI: 1.16sigma; 1.44sigma) among black girls, 0.8sigma for black boys, 0.7sigma for white boys, and 0.6sigma for white girls. This translates into an increase in BMI values of some 5.6, 3.3, 2.4, and 1.5 units respectively. While the increase in BMI ...

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