The relationship between childhood obesity and food insecurity: a nonparametric analysis

Oluyemisi Kuku, Steven Garasky and Craig Gundersen

Applied Economics, 2012, vol. 44, issue 21, 2667-2677

Abstract: Childhood obesity and food insecurity are major public health concerns in the United States and other developed countries. Research on the relationship between the two has provided mixed results across a variety of data sets and empirical methods. Common throughout this research, however, is the use of parametric frameworks for empirical analyses. This study moves beyond parametric methods by examining the relationship between childhood obesity and food insecurity among low-income children with nonparametric regression techniques. We examine data from the Child Development Supplement (CDS) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a nationally representative data set from the US. Consistent with recent work, our parametric analyses indicate that there is no statistically significant relationship between childhood obesity and food insecurity. In contrast, our nonparametric results indicate that the probability of being obese varies markedly with the level of food insecurity being experienced by the child. Moreover, this relationship differs across relevant subgroups including those defined by gender, race/ethnicity and income. Fully understanding the relationship between childhood obesity and food insecurity has significant policy implications.

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00036846.2011.566192 (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:applec:44:y:2012:i:21:p:2667-2677

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAEC20

DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2011.566192

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Economics is currently edited by Anita Phillips

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