The high and rapidly rising adult obesity rates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand are associated with major health risks, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, stroke, and some forms of cancer; large health care costs; and premature deaths annually. For...

The extant literature on fat taxes and thin subsidies tends to focus on the overall effectiveness of such fiscal instruments in altering diets and improving health. However, little is known about the welfare impacts of fiscal food policies on society. This paper fills a gap in the literature...

More than one billion adults are overweight worldwide, and more than 300 million of them clinically obese, raising the risk of many serious diseases. Only 3.6 percent of Japanese have a body mass index (BMI) over 30, which is the international standard for obesity, whereas 32.0 percent of...

This paper examines the health effects of a fiscal food policy based on a combinationof fat taxes and thin subsidies. The fat tax is based on the saturated fat content of fooditems while the thin subsidy is applied to select fruit and vegetbale items. The policy is designed to be revenue neutral...

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages has been proposed as a means to reduce calorie intake, improve diet and health, and generate revenue that governments can use to address the obesity-caused health and economic burden. Two beverage demand systems were estimated using beverage purchase data for...

The extant literature on fat taxes and thin subsidies tends to focus on the overall effectiveness of such fiscal instruments in altering diets and improving health. However, little is known about the welfare impacts of fiscal food policies on society. This paper fills a gap in the literature by...

Obesity is still on the rise, leading to high costs for the obese individual itself but also for society. We analyze the influence of peer effects on food choices in lunchrooms with posted nutrition facts. Data were collected in a lunchroom at a large U.S. university. Groups of four patrons each...

This study investigates whether peers are a contributing factor in the increase in childhood obesity rates, and whether peer effects vary by race, gender and residential neighborhood. We control for the commercial food environment around schools and residence when estimating peer effects given...

Recent studies examine the impact of the built environment on health outcomes such as obesity. Several studies find for certain populations that access to unhealthy food has a positive effect on obesity, whereas access to healthy choices has a negative effect. Given the growth and popularity of...

In this study we investigate the impact of various socioeconomic, health and behavioural conditions on the prevalence of obesity in nine EU countries using the “European Community Household Panel†Dataset. The effect of those factors on obesity is estimated separately for males and...