Time Well Spent: How Watching Time can Reduce the Chances of Having Overweight Children

The factors affecting the childhood overweight are many and not well understood. Childhood overweight problem has its own distinct aspects compared to adult obesity: parental time constraints and parental behavioral factors play significant roles. Several disciplines are exploring the answers for "what families can do" type of questions. There is a merging need for a model that can address the uniqueness of childhood overweight and incorporate multi-disciplinary factors in a theoretically consistent way. This study answers those calls through integrating a collective household production model within a two-stage Stackelberg game structure to model the dynamic of the household. The framework is flexible enough to allow non-economic determinants to be incorporated in a theoretically consistent fashion. The theoretical and empirical framework developed in this study should prove attractive for future work looking to model and understand the relationship between food consumption, time allocation, and health outcomes, as these are obviously interrelated activities that should be modeled together if possible. This book is addressed to professionals in economics, sociology, human nutrition and public health. It is also directed towards researchers and graduate students who are working on multi-disciplinary projects on human nutrition topics. This work is the winner of the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award of American Agricultural Economics Association in 2006. The association will change the name to Agricultural and Applied Economics Association this year.