TY  - JOUR
AU  - Cawley,John
AU  - Frisvold,David
AU  - Meyerhoefer,Chad
TI  - The Impact of Physical Education on Obesity among Elementary School Children
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 18341
PY  - 2012
Y2  - August 2012
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18341
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18341.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
John Cawley
3M24 MVR Hall
Department of Policy Analysis and Management
and Department of Economics
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853
Tel: 607/255-0952
Fax: 607/255-4071
E-Mail: jhc38@cornell.edu

David Frisvold
Emory University
Department of Economics
1602 Fishburne Drive
Atlanta, GA 30322-2240
E-Mail: david.frisvold@emory.edu

Chad Meyerhoefer
Rauch Business Center
Lehigh University
621 Taylor Street
Bethlehem, PA 18015
Tel: 610/758-3445
Fax: 610/758-4677
E-Mail: chm308@lehigh.edu
AB  - In response to the dramatic rise in childhood obesity, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other organizations have advocated increasing the time that elementary school children spend in physical education (PE) classes. However, little is known about the effect of PE on child weight. This paper measures that effect by instrumenting for child PE time with state policies, using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) for 1998-2004. Results from IV models indicate that PE lowers BMI z-score and reduces the probability of obesity among 5th graders (in particular, boys), while the instrument is insufficiently powerful to reliably estimate effects for younger children. This represents some of the first evidence of a causal effect of PE on youth obesity, and thus offers at least some support to the assumptions behind the CDC recommendations. We find no evidence that increased PE time crowds out time in academic courses or has spillovers to achievement test scores.
ER  -