NBER Publications by Roy Wada

We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on body-mass index (BMI). We merge measures of body composition from bioelectrical-impedance analysis (BIA) and dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry (DXA) from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey with individual level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and data on local fast-food restaurant advertising on television from Competitive Media Reporting. Exposure to fast-food restaurant advertising on television causes statistically significant increases in PBF in adolescents. These results are consistent wit...

This paper examines the effect of body composition on wages. We develop measures of body composition – body fat (BF) and fat-free mass (FFM) – using data on bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) that are available in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey III and estimate wage models for white respondents in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Previous research used body size or BMI for measuring obesity despite the growing concern in the medical literature that BMI-based measures do not distinguish between body fat and fat-free body mass and that BMI does not adequately control for non-homogeneity inside human body. Therefore, measures used in this paper represent a useful alternative to BMI-based proxies of obesity. This paper also contributes to the growin...