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

Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 ChildYoung Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on children and adolescents being overweight. The advertising measure used is the number of hours of spot television fast-food restaurant advertising messages seen per week. Our results indicate that 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 banned completely from television. Shin-Yi Chou Inas Rashad Michael Grossman Department of Economics Department of Economics Ph.D. Program in Economics Lehigh University Georgia State University City University of New York 621 Taylor Street P.O. Box 3992 Graduate Center Bethlehem, PA 18015 Atlanta, GA 30302-3992 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor and NBER [email protected] New York, NY 10016-4309 [email protected] and NBER [email protected]