Economics Faculty Feature
Professor Inas Kelly conducts research in demand-side health and labor economics, with a focus on economic decisions surrounding nutrition and physical activity. She teaches econometrics at Queens and health economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. In July's issue of the journal Economics and Human Biology, in a paper entitled "Exposure to food advertising on television: Associations with children's fast food and soft drink consumption and obesity," Professor Kelly and her coauthors explore microeconomic incentives in children's food consumption by focusing on the effects of various types of food advertising on television. They employ a nationally-representative sample from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and data on spot television advertising of cereals, fast food restaurants, and soft drinks from the Nielsen Company. Their results suggest that soft drink and fast food television advertising is associated with increased consumption of soft drinks and fast food among fifth graders. Exposure to 100 incremental TV ads for sugar-sweetened carbonated soft drinks during 2002-2004 was associated with a 9.4% rise in children's consumption of soft drinks in 2004. The same increase in exposure to fast food advertising was associated with a 1.1% rise in children's consumption of fast food. The authors conclude that exposure to advertising for calorie-dense nutrient-poor foods may increase overall consumption of unhealthy food categories, and policy may need to address these negative externalities. A link to the published paper may be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X11000293.
In her work in progress, Professor Kelly uses data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to analyze the potential effects of the Americans with Disabilities Act on health and labor market outcomes for different groups of individuals.
