Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and Its Influence on Childhood Obesity

Shin-Yi Chou, Inas Rashad and Michael Grossman ()

Journal of Law & Economics, 2008, vol. 51, issue 4, pages 599-618

Abstract: Childhood obesity is an escalating problem around the world that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of television fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents with respect to being overweight. A ban on these advertisements would reduce the number of overweight children ages 3-11 in a fixed population by 18 percent and would reduce the number of overweight adolescents ages 12-18 by 14 percent. The elimination of the tax deductibility of this type of advertising 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. (c) 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..

Date: 2008
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/590132 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Fast-Food Restaurant Advertising on Television and Its Influence on Childhood Obesity (2005)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jlawec:v:51:y:2008:i:4:p:599-618

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLE/order1.html

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Law & Economics is edited by Dennis W. Carlton, Austan Goolsbee, Randall S. Krosner, Douglas Lichtman and Edward A. Snyder

More articles in Journal of Law & Economics from University of Chicago Press
Address: The University of Chicago Press, Journals Division, P.O. Box 37005 Chicago, IL 60637
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().