Author(s)
Pietro Biroli, Teodora Boneva, Akash Raja, Christopher Rauh

Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and poses negative externalities to health services. Its increase in recent decades can be traced back to unhealthy habits acquired in the household. We investigate whether parental beliefs play a role by eliciting beliefs about the returns to a recommended-calorie diet and regular exercise using hypothetical investment scenarios. We show that perceived returns are predictive of health investments and outcomes, and that less educated parents perceive the returns to health investments to be lower, thus contributing to the socioeconomic inequality in health outcomes and the intergenerational transmission of obesity.

JEL Codes
D19: Household Behavior and Family Economics: Other
I10: Health: General
I12: Health Production
I14: Health and Inequality
Keywords
parental investments
health
beliefs
inequality
equality of opportunity
obesity