Family Ties and Child Obesity in Italy

Federico Crudu (), Laura Neri () and Silvia Tiezzi ()

Department of Economics University of Siena from Department of Economics, University of Siena

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of overweight family members on weight outcomes of Italian children aged 6 to 14 years. We use an original dataset matching the 2012 cross sections of the Italian Multipurpose Household Survey and the House hold Budget Survey. Since the identification of within-family peer effects is known to be challenging, we implement our analysis on a partially identified model using inferential procedures recently introduced in the literature and based on standard Bayesian computation methods. We find evidence of a strong, positive effect of both overweight peer children in the family and of overweight adults on children weight outcomes. The impact of overweight peer children in the household is larger than the impact of adults. In particular, the estimated confidence sets associated to the peer children variable is positive with upper bound around one or larger, while the confidence sets for the parameter associated to obese adults often include zero and have upper bound that rarely is larger than one.

Keywords: child obesity; confidence sets; partial identification; peer effects within the family (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C15 C21 C35 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: Family ties and child obesity in Italy (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:usi:wpaper:845

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