TY - JOUR AU - Chou,Shin-Yi AU - Rashad,Inas AU - Grossman,Michael TI - Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and Its Influence on Childhood Obesity JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 11879 PY - 2005 Y2 - December 2005 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11879 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11879.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Shin-Yi Chou Department of Economics College of Business and Economics Lehigh University 621 Taylor Street Bethlehem, PA 18015-3117 Tel: 610/758-3444 Fax: NA E-Mail: syc2@lehigh.edu Inas Rashad Kelly Queens College, CUNY Economics Department 300 Powdermaker Hall 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367 Tel: (718) 997-5440 E-Mail: Inas.Kelly@qc.cuny.edu Michael Grossman Ph.D. Program in Economics City University of New York Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor New York, NY 10016-4309 Tel: 212/817-7959 Fax: 212/817-1597 E-Mail: mgrossman@gc.cuny.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2006-08-01 AB - 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. ER -