Do 'Cheeseburger Bills' Work? Effects of Tort Reform for Fast Food / Christopher S. Carpenter, D. Sebastian Tello-Trillo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carpenter, Christopher S.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Tello-Trillo, D. Sebastian.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w21170.

NBER working paper series no. w21170

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2015.

Summary:

After highly publicized lawsuits against McDonald's in 2002, 26 states adopted Commonsense Consumption Acts (CCAs) - aka 'Cheeseburger Bills' - that greatly limit fast food companies' liability for weight-related harms. We provide the first evidence of the effects of CCAs using plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of CCA adoption across states. In two-way fixed effects models, we find that CCAs significantly increased stated attempts to lose weight and consumption of fruits and vegetables among heavy individuals. We also find some evidence that CCAs increased employment in fast food. Finally, we find that CCAs significantly increased the number of company-owned McDonald's restaurants and decreased the number of franchise-owned McDonald's restaurants in a state. Overall our results provide novel evidence supporting a key prediction of tort reform - that it should induce individuals to take more care - and show that industry-specific tort reforms can have meaningful effects on market outcomes.

Notes:

Print version record

May 2015.