 Economic preferences and obesity among a low-income African American communityAngela de Oliveira, Tammy Leonard, Kerem Shuval, Celette Sugg Skinner, Catherine Eckel and James C. Murdoch Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol. 131, issue PB, 196-208 Abstract: Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the US, with a significantly higher fraction of African Americans who are obese than whites. Yet there is little understanding of why some individuals become obese while others do not. We conduct a lab-in-field experiment in a low-income African American community to investigate whether risk and time preferences play a role in the tendency to become obese. We examine the relationship between incentivized measures of risk and time preferences and weight status (BMI), and find that individuals who are more tolerant of risk are more likely to have a higher BMI. This result is driven by the most risk tolerant individuals. Patience is not independently statistically related to BMI in this sample, but those who are more risk averse and patient are less likely to be obese. Keywords: Obesity; Risk preference; Time preference; Field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:131:y:2016:i:pb:p:196-208 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.11.002 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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