The Effect of Leisure-time Physical Activity on Obesity, Diabetes, High BP and Heart Disease among Canadians: Evidence from 2000/01 to 2005/06

Sisira Sarma, Rose Anne Devlin, Jason Gilliland, Karen Campbell and Gregory Zaric

No 130001, Working Papers from Canadian Centre for Health Economics

Abstract: Although many papers have looked at the effect of physical activity on obesity and other health outcomes, the causal nature of this relationship remains unclear. We try to fill this gap by investigating the impact of leisure-time physical activity (LTPA) and work-related physical activity (WRPA) on obesity and chronic conditions in Canadian adults aged 18-75 using instrumental variable and recursive bivariate probit approaches. Average local temperatures surrounding the respondents' interview month are used as a novel instrument to help identify the causal relationship between LTPA and health outcomes. We find that an active level of LTPA (i.e. walking greater than or equal to 1 hour/day) reduces the probability of obesity by five percentage points, which increases to eleven percentage points if also combined with some work-related physical activity. WRPA exhibits a negative effect on the probability of obesity and chronic conditions.

Keywords: obesity; physical activity; chronic disease; probit; instrumental variable; recursive bivariate probit; canada (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I10 I12 I18 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published Online, November 2013

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.canadiancentreforhealtheconomics.ca/wp- ... al_working-paper.pdf First version, 2013 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cch:wpaper:130001

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Canadian Centre for Health Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrian Rohit Dass ().