Economic crises and obesity: evidence and mechanism from the United States

Yudong Deng, Huixia Wang and Chenggang Wang

Applied Economics Letters, 2024, vol. 31, issue 12, 1136-1141

Abstract: Existing studies that explore the relationship between business cycles and health remain debated. This study investigates the effects of economic fluctuation on obesity in the United States. Using the county-level unemployment rates from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we find that people are less likely to be obese during economic downturns. Particularly, a one percentage points increase in unemployment rates would lead to the chances of being obese reduced by 0.45% points. We further explore the underlying mechanisms of how business fluctuations affect obesity. We find that people tend to do more exercise and spend less on food expenditure during the economic downturns.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13504851.2023.2176439 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:apeclt:v:31:y:2024:i:12:p:1136-1141

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEL20

DOI: 10.1080/13504851.2023.2176439

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics Letters is currently edited by Anita Phillips

More articles in Applied Economics Letters from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().