gas prices and obesity

Charles Courtemanche (UNC Greensboro) presents evidence of a relationship between gasoline prices and obesity. When gas prices are higher, people tend to be less fat. From his abstract:

My estimates imply that 8% of the rise in obesity between 1979 and 2004 can be attributed to the concurrent drop in real gas prices, and that a permanent $1 increase in gasoline prices would reduce overweight and obesity in the United States by 7% and 10%.

The paper attributes this relationship between gas prices and weight to the effect that changes in gas prices have on the frequency of walking and restaurant eating.

The paper was recently published in Economic Inquiry. Read the paper here.

do fast food ads result in fat kids?

In a new paper out in The Journal of Law and Economics, Shin-Yi Chou (Lehigh), Inas Rashad (Georgia State), and Michael Grossman (CUNY) study the effects that fast-food advertising on TV has on overweight children. They estimate that banning advertisements would decrease the number of overweight children by 14 to 18 percent. A ban might not be optimal, however, since it may also reduce the amount of information available to consumers. (For example, being informed that it is Monopoly time at McDonalds could arguably make you better off.)

The authors go on to show that eliminating the "tax deductability of would produce smaller declines of between 5 and 7 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 completely banned from television."

Read the article. If that doesn't work, try here.

money and happiness

It turns out that money can buy happiness, but you get more of a bang for your buck if you spend your money when you're young -- before your health deteriorates and you become less able to enjoy that night on the town or that barefoot cruise through the Caribbean. These are the findings of a new working paper by Amy Finkelstein (MIT), Erzo Luttmer (Harvard) and Matthew Notowidigdo (MIT). Finally, some evidence in favor of spending our money now, rather than investing it until retirement.

Read the article in Slate.

Download the paper.

impact of universal child care

In a recent Journal of Political Economy paper, Michael Baker (Toronto), Jonathan Gruber (MIT), and Kevin Milligan (British Columbia) study the effects of a universal child care program in Quebec. Unsurprisingly, they find that the program significantly increases maternal labor supply--more moms return to work and/or work more after the birth of a child. What's surprising is that the program appears to make children worse off on a variety of dimensions.

...the evidence suggests that children are worse off by measures ranging from aggression to motor and social skills to illness. We also uncover evidence that the new child care program led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.

Why would this be? Does this mean that childcare in general could be causing these affects? Not necessarily. First, they cannot rule out that these negative aspects result from a short-term adjustment process, as families adjust to using childcare. Second, I speculate that universal childcare likely changes the composition of children at daycare centers, which may have similar results as changing the composition of inmates at a juvenile detention center (see the earlier post).

Read the paper

women's suffrage and child health

Are women more concerned than men about the wellbeing of children? If that is true--or if politicians perceive it to be true--then increasing female participation in politics could lead to more policies that benefit children. Grant Miller (Stanford) tests this hypothesis in a new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He finds evidence suggesting that giving women the right to vote led to higher child wellbeing. From the paper abstract:

...Suffrage rights for American women helped children to benefit from the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. ... Suffrage laws were followed by immediate shifts in legislative behavior and large, sudden increases in local public health spending. This growth in public health spending fueled large-scale door-to-door hygiene campaigns, and child mortality declined by 8–15% (or 20,000 annual child deaths nationwide)...

Read the article

could television cause autism?

This study from some economists at Cornell is interesting. Mike Waldman, Sean Nicholson, and Nodir Adilov find a link between the rate of television viewing by kids under 3 years old and the rate of autism in the population.

A Summary in Slate Magazine

The Actually Study

Despite this, I'm still looking forward to the day that my wife surprises me with a big-screen HDTV.