Do sugar-sweetened beverage taxes improve public health for high school aged adolescents?

Abstract

Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes have become an increasingly popular policy to combat the worldwide obesity epidemic, but relatively little is known about their impact on health outcomes, particularly among high school aged students. In this paper, I use public-use data from the Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance Systemto determine whether high school students living in three of the American cities which have implemented Sugar-sweetened beverage taxes have experienced public health improvements. Using an event-study design that compares outcomes in treated districts to a group of similar control districts, I find reductions in soda consumption in Philadelphia and average body mass indexin Philadelphia, San Francisco and Oakland, with suggestive evidence that the improvements are concentrated among female and non-white respondents in both cases.