Studying the Child Obesity Epidemic With Natural ExperimentsRobert Sandy, Gilbert Liu, John Ottensmann, Rusty Tchernis, Jeffrey Wilson, O.T. Ford
NBER Working Paper No. 14989 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. The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this.
You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. Published: 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 (2011), University of Chicago Press This paper is available as PDF (1666 K) or via email.
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