Are School Finances Contributing to Childrens Obesity?
(NBER Working Paper No. 11177), co-authors Patricia Anderson and Kristin Butcher combine data from several sources to examine both the effect of financial pressure on school food policies and whether these school food policies help create overweight adolescents. They find that schools that are under financial pressure are more likely to make junk food available to their students, to have “pouring rights” contracts, and to allow food and beverage advertising to students. By using measures that capture financial pressure to predict the fraction of schools in a county with these particular food policies, they then estimate the effect of the fraction of schools in a county with these food policies on adolescent body mass index (BMI). They find that it is the actual availability of junk food, rather than advertising or pouring rights, that is associated with weight gain. In general, “a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of schools with junk food is correlated with about a 1 perc
