Mothers Work Intensity and Childhood Obesity- Further Evidence from Us Survey Data

Abstract

This paper extends Anderson et al (2003) and Lakdawalla et al. (2009) models to examine the socioeconomic factors affecting obesity and overweight problem among children. In particular, this paper investigates whether an increase in the mother's work intensity, in tenns of number of hours of work per week, is associated with childhood obesity and children becoming overweight. The data is collected from "The Child Development Supplement (CDS)" from the University of Michigan for this study. We use Tobit model to deal with the censoring problem in the data. We also apply sensitivity analysis in order to check for the robustness of the coefficients. The results slww that an increase in the mothers' work intensity is positively related to an increase in the likelihood of a child becoming overweight or obese, all else equal. These findings provide some guidance in designing public policy in order to reduce obesity and overweight problem among children.