Do Cheeseburger Bills Work? Effects of Tort Reform for Fast Food

Abstract

Viscusi, and seminar participants at McMaster and Vanderbilt Universities for extremely helpful comments. We are grateful to Pedro Salcido for valuable research assistance at the early stages of this project and to Steve Rogers for providing state political variables. All errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

State‐mandated school‐based BMI assessments and self‐reported adolescent health behaviors

“…The vector also includes an indicator for whether the state had standards for school meals exceeding United States Department of Agriculture requirements (Capogrossi & You, 2017; Cullen et al., 2008; Wojcicki & Heyman, 2006). I also control for state policies limiting fast‐food companies’ liability for weight‐related harms, which have been linked to changes in weight‐related behaviors (Carpenter & Tello‐Trillo, 2015; Wilking & Daynard, 2013).…”

“…Though there is considerable work on policies intended to internalize the external costs of obesity, little is known about the role of imperfect information—and the laws intended to correct it—in childhood obesity. Moreover, while recent scholarship has yielded mixed evidence as to the efficacy of many anti‐obesity policies (Carpenter & Tello‐Trillo, 2015; Cawley et al., 2013; Cawley & Price, 2013; Sabia et al., 2017), less attention has been paid to the possible negative consequences associated with these laws. Yet mental health advocates have repeatedly expressed concerns that youth‐targeted anti‐obesity laws could unintentionally increase the incidence of body dysmorphic disorder and result in the onset of eating disorders (Sliwa et al., 2019; Wallace, 2016), and a recent U.S.…”

Swallow This: Childhood and Adolescent Exposure to Fast Food Restaurants, BMI, and Cognitive Ability

“…In Canada, a ban on the sale of junk food in schools also led to a reduction in the students' BMI (Leonard, 2017). Furthermore, less extreme policy measures such as calorie posting (Bollinger et al, 2011;Restrepo, 2017;Aranda et al, 2021), common sense consumption acts (Carpenter and Tello-Trillo, 2015), advertisement bans (Dubois et al, 2018), and soda taxes (Fletcher et al, 2010;Dubois et al, 2020;Seiler et al, 2021) may also prove effective by either directly changing consumption patterns or indirectly encouraging increases in healthy behaviors.…”