Food Prices and Body Fatness among Youths

Research for this paper was supported by grant #65068 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to the National Bureau of Economic Research. This paper was presented at the Eighth World Congress of the International Health Economics Association and at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Healthy Eating Research Program. We are grateful to John Cawley who discussed our paper at the first forum just mentioned, to the other participants in both forums, and to Jesse Margolis for helpful comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank Jesse, Ryan Conrad, and Ben Padd for research assistance. We are indebted to Karen Davis, formerly a health scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics Research Data Center (RDC); Stephanie Robinson, a health scientist at the NCHS RDC; Frances McCarty, a senior service research fellow at the NCHS RDC; and Frank Limehouse, RDC Administrator at the Chicago Bureau of the Census RDC, for their assistance in helping us to gain access to and work with restricted files from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey at the Chicago RDC. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.