Venue: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, 1 Towerview Drive, Durham, NC 27708-0120
Presentation
Food Insecurity in the Household: Influences from Food Consumption and the Family Knowledge
There is a clear link between food insecurity (FI) and cognitive functioning. Additionally, there is positive association between cognitive functioning and human capital accumulation. Given that human capital accumulation is associated with future productivity and earnings, social scientists are devoted to investigating childhood malnutrition. The U.S. faces two types of pediatric malnutrition, overweight and obese children as well as the number of children who are underweight. Both forms of malnutrition have been under scrutiny by researchers as the prevalence of overweight children has increased dramatically over the past two decades and the percentage of children who are underweight has been unacceptably high. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of household production and household knowledge of nutrition on malnutrition in children.
Traditionally, analyses of this type have had to reconcile the fact that they may not observe important information on parental behavior, household environment, nutritional consumption, in children that is potentially correlated with nutritional outcomes of children. The analysis would then have to either use OLS regression models and produce biased results or use instrumental variable models to correct for the unobserved heterogeneity and have the instrument choice be scrutinized. In order to overcome this challenge, this paper uses data from the Current Survey of Food Intake 1994-1996; 1998(CSF II). These data provide unique information on the traditionally unobserved characteristics that are important influences on nutritional outcomes.
Using the data from CSF II we extend the analysis to consider the relationship between food production, familial knowledge regarding nutrition and outcomes. Our models will control for family characteristics that might be correlated with nutrition such as working outside the home, family size, family structure and socioeconomic characteristics of the family. Our preliminary analyses suggest that there is a clear association between time devoted to food preparation and outcomes such as the probability of being overweight or obese and being underweight. The obvious extension to this analysis is to investigate contributions from parental or family influences v.s. genetic make up. Since, we can control for calorie consumption and nutritional value of the food, in addition to the family and environmental influences, the remaining error should capture all unobserved influences on outcomes (including perhaps the genetic component).