Roommate effects in health outcomes

Effects of programs and interventions related to the social environment on childhood and adolescent obesity: A systematic search for and scoping review of natural experiments

Given the potential importance of social environment on obesity and to better understand their causal relationship amongst children and adolescents, this scoping review systematically searches for and evaluates programs and interventions using natural experiment designs. A majority of the studies assessing peer and social norm effects reported significant findings. Peer effects with nontrivial effect sizes likely have practical implications for interventions, while a strong conclusion cannot be drawn for social norm and neighborhood safety effects. Leveraging naturally occurring data might provide future research with a promising way of establishing a more robust causal inference for the topic of interest.

Snacks, nudges and asymmetric peer influence: Evidence from food choice experiments with children in Indonesia

Many children in low- and middle-income countries are growing up during a rapid nutrition transition. Experimental evidence on food choice in developing countries is scarce, while it is unclear to what extent evidence from high-income countries can be generalized. Children participated in a snack choice experiment. We expose some children to emoji labels encouraging healthy snacks, while others observe healthy or unhealthy snacking by peers. While emoji labels moderately promote healthy snacking, the adverse effect of observing a peer eating the unhealthy snack is very large. The effect associated with observing a healthy peer is insignificant. Additionally, cross-randomized blocks of children watched a nutrition video to study the interaction of information provision and nudging. The video independently improves healthy choices but does not aid the emoji nudge and cannot counter the strong negative peer effect. We compare our findings to studies conducted in developed countries and discuss policy implications.