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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic crises
• obesity
• exercise
• food expenditure

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• E24
• E32
• I12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See Obesity and overweight (who.int).

² The self-reported height and weight might not be accurate, we followed the method from Cawley et al., (2015) to adjust the BMI.

³ Individual-level health status, health behaviours or any other demographic characteristics almost cannot affect the aggregate level economic conditions.

⁴ This method can automatically control for the time-invariant and time-variant factors spuriously correlated with the economic fluctuations across state or county.

⁵ The reduction of food expenditure can be induced by the consumption of healthy food or by substituting cheap and unhealthy food. Our data do not provide detailed information on the sample’s diary record; hence it is difficult to distinguish the two effects. Our results only capture the net effects of economic conditions on total food expenditure.

⁶ In Table A3, we further test the effects of a one-year lag of the unemployment rate on obesity. We do not find any statistically significant effects in Table A3. We also divide our sample periods into 1999–2005 and 2007–2013 presented in Table A4. Specifically, we find nonsignificant effects for the beginning period and weak statistically significant effects for the end period.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation [18CJY001].