@article{bc6e3e2af6df42ad98f168e649243d4c,
title = "Economic preferences and obesity among a low-income African American community",
abstract = "Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the US, with a significantly higher fraction of African Americans who are obese than whites. Yet there is little understanding of why some individuals become obese while others do not. We conduct a lab-in-field experiment in a low-income African American community to investigate whether risk and time preferences play a role in the tendency to become obese. We examine the relationship between incentivized measures of risk and time preferences and weight status (BMI), and find that individuals who are more tolerant of risk are more likely to have a higher BMI. This result is driven by the most risk tolerant individuals. Patience is not independently statistically related to BMI in this sample, but those who are more risk averse and patient are less likely to be obese.",
keywords = "Field experiment, Obesity, Risk preference, Time preference",
author = "{de Oliveira}, {Angela C M} and Leonard, {Tammy C M} and Kerem Shuval and Skinner, {Celette Sugg} and Catherine Eckel and Murdoch, {James C.}",
note = "Funding Information: We wish to thank Rachel Croson, Natalia Candelo Londo{\~n}o, Moyo Kimathi, and Beth Pickett for assistance in study design and data collection. All research involving human subjects has been approved by the Institutional Review Boards of the University of Texas at Dallas (IRB Approval Number 08-33), University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston Institutional Review Boards. Informed written consent for study participation was obtained from each subject. This study was funded by the National Science Foundation ( NSF/SES-0827350 ). Research reported in this publication was also supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award Number UL1TR001105. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2015 Elsevier B.V.",
year = "2016",
month = nov,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1016/j.jebo.2015.11.002",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "131",
pages = "196--208",
journal = "Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization",
issn = "0167-2681",
publisher = "Elsevier",
}