TY - JOUR AU - Powell, Lisa M AU - Chaloupka, Frank J TI - Economic Contextual Factors and Child Body Mass Index JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15046 PY - 2009 Y2 - June 2009 DO - 10.3386/w15046 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15046 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15046.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Lisa Powell Institute for Health Research and Policy University of Illinois at Chicago 1747 W. Roosevelt Road Rm 558, MC275 Chicago, IL 60608 Tel: 312-413-8468 Fax: 312-355-2801 E-Mail: powelll@uic.edu Frank J. Chaloupka IV University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Economics (m/c 144) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences 601 S. Morgan Street, Room 713 Chicago, IL 60607-7121 Tel: 312/413-2287 Fax: 312/996-3344;630/801-8870 E-Mail: fjc@uic.edu M1 - published as Lisa M. Powell, Frank J. Chaloupka. "Economic Contextual Factors and Child Body Mass Index," in Michael Grossman and Naci H. Mocan, editors, "Economic Aspects of Obesity" University of Chicago Press (2011) M3 - presented at "Economic Aspects of Obesity", November 10-11, 2008 AB - This study examines the relationship between child weight and fast food and fruit and vegetable prices and the availability of fast food restaurants, full-service restaurants, supermarkets, grocery stores and convenience stores. We estimate cross-sectional and individual-level fixed effects (FE) models to account for unobserved individual-level heterogeneity. Data are drawn from the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics combined with external food price and outlet density data at the zip code level. FE results show that higher fruit and vegetable prices are statistically significantly related to a higher body mass index (BMI) percentile ranking among children with greater effects among low-income children: fruit and vegetable price elasticity for BMI is estimated to be 0.25 for the full sample and 0.60 among low-income children. Fast food prices are statistically significantly related to child weight only in cross-sectional models among low-income children with a price elasticity of -0.77. Increased supermarket availability and fewer available convenience stores are related with lower weight outcomes among low-income children. These results provide evidence on the potential effectiveness of using fiscal pricing interventions such as taxes and subsidies and other interventions to improve supermarket access as policy instruments to address childhood obesity. ER -